I never met Conway myself. But I first encountered his Game of Life in a science fiction book I no longer remember the title of. The book didn't make much of an impression but the game did. I played it out on paper during long car trips and when we got our first computer the first code I ever wrote that wasn't "hello world" was an implementation of Conways Game of Life in gw-basic.
In a way his game helped start me on the path to the career I have now.
For me was Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer, in which an alien appears at the Royal Ontario Museum and asks to speak with their paleontologist. Through that book, GoL was my on-ramp to all kinds of cellular automata, a-life, and procedural generation techniques that I still find fascinating.
In a way his game helped start me on the path to the career I have now.