Well, I was born in 1996, but my family had a SNES (including DKC and DKC3) and they weren't willing to move on to the N64 (back then, my family didn't spend too much money on videogames, since there were more important things) so I still had time to enjoy the SNES, instead of starting with the N64. So, when I was 3, I played SNES all the time, from DKC to Super Mario All-Stars+Super Mario World. Of course, when we bought the N64, we were big Banjo Tooie fans (my mom didn't want to play the first). And on my 8th birthday, my mom bought two GBAs (one for my sis, one for me) along with DKC2 and Yoshi's Island. I didn't like DKC2 on GBA that much (I got stuck on a level and I didn't want to play it again). But in 2005, all of that changed. I got my SNES back (my cousin had it for a while) for the whole summer, and I started to play DKC again. Needless to say, I loved the game after 4 years of not playing it, so I found out more about it on the Web, and I passed DKC3. But what happened to DKC2? On this year, I was surfing the Internet, and found out DKC2 was considered the best of the trilogy. I went to DKC-Atlas to see if it was THAT good, and everyone considered DKC2 the best. So I purchased it in the Virtual Console, and it was great! Of course, my favorite is the first one I played, DKC3!
So yeah, that's the whole story behind how I discovered DKC's awesomeness!
The only bad thing: I'm the ONLY person who knew about the series in my classroom, so I told my best friends about it, but they said it sucks, except one of them, who says that they're ok, but not really his style.