I got into Battletech/MechWarrior when the 1989 video game came out. That game actually required you to learn a lot of the lore to actually even find the single player story. Otherwise after playing for a while you would get an in game email (before e-mail even really existed) saying that you had been ultimately found guilty in absence for your crimes against your family and the Federated Suns. A fact that you wouldn't even know about if you didn't read a separate letter that was included in the game box....
Anyway, I started reading the novels at that time. And played a few rounds of the tabletop game with some friends. It was a little bit of a shock for me when they advanced the years ahead and then started the whole clan invasion, but I have to admit that was an awesome change. An animated TV series came out at that time which closely followed the major storylines in the novels showing the beginning of the clan invasion (I can't remember how far the series went since I never saw them all, and they were always out of order just like any other animated show in the US since to the TV execs at the time it was just a kids show with no actual deeper storyline, just episodic like Tom and Jerry, or The Jetsons). This was right at the time of MW2 coming out (yeah, MechWarrior 2, the real MW2, not "Modern Warfare 2").
I own/borrow/read every book in the Clan invasion/FedCom war time period. I also read all but the last 4 or 5 books in the Dark Ages line (for those that don't know, they jumped ahead in time again, this time 90 years from the last book in the FedCom war). The problem that happened in the universe is that mechs became too common, so that was part of the reason for the jump in time. Mechs were rare again after so many years of peace and prosperity. The factories were most all decommissioned or destroyed by the events that occurred. Basically, it was a good move for the board game and storylines as well. Unfortunately, at that same time FASA had been sold to Wizkids, and then Wizkids started going and did go bankrupt, and so everything pretty much ended at that point. I am glad that the original creators of Battletech were able to re-aquire the IP rights and have started to bring it back again.
So, in other words, I have 20+ years in this