Thanksgiving vacation, 1997, my dad took me to Best Buy to get a Nintendo 64. The Sony PlayStation section was on the way to the Nintendo section, and they had rows of kiosks running trailers for Final Fantasy VII, Bushido Blade, etc. Left the store with a PlayStation and those two games instead. The Final Fantasy VII trailer was just so cool to me, I still remember the scene of Cloud coming down the stairs on the Hardy Daytona. That's what sold me.
I had already been a Final Fantasy fan, I played Final Fantasy II on the SNES back in the second grade (1992), after which my mom got us the original for NES, and naturally I played Final Fantasy III, too. I grew up playing RPGs, Dragon Warrior 1-3 were frequent rentals at my house. My mom was into RPGs too, so she'd often get them for herself (years later she even learned how to use emulators and apply translation patches so she could play all the SNES games that never got released in English).
I can't recall why I didn't seem to really be aware of Final Fantasy VII at the time, before seeing the kiosks. I remember the soda promos at the grocery store around the same time, but for some reason it was off my radar. I think during that time period I might have switched from a GamePro subscription to Nintendo Power... all of my friends at the time were super into Nintendo and N64.
Anyway, it worked out really well. PlayStation games were generally way cheaper, so I was able to amass quite a collection. And all my friends had N64s and the same exact library of games, so I didn't miss out on anything there.