Hello there,
I'm Niko, born and raised in Germany, but with Balkan roots. In 2001, My kinda first contact with the franchise was, when I visited my cousins in Serbia and they've talked about Terminator and Predator, because they were big Schwarzenegger fans. I remember that they've explained me the whole movie and how that "awesome" alien could make himself invisible like a ghost and kill everybody, exept Arnie of course.
Later in 2005 after AVP came out, a classmate in school started to talk about it and how cool it was. He was like "yeah, they're doing now these" versus "movies with all those Horror movie monsters, just like Freddy vs. Jason..." (I doubt he knew the old connection Alien and Predator shared lol) He rented me a copy of the movie and I remember really liking it. That sparked my Alien / Predator / AVP love: watched the older movies, played the games AVP2 for PC and Predator Concrete Jungle for PS2, read the comics and so on.
Now with Predator 5, the Alien series, the upcoming Marvel Comics and Predator Hunting Grounds, I'm still hyped up to see what the future will bring us.
Good hunting!