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Serious Sam The First Encounter claims to have invented event cued music. Ie, intense fight music stops once an encounter is over.
Quake is believed by many to have invented Rocket Jumping, but Marathon (1993) had two forms of it first.
Marathon and Rise of the Triad both released with duel welding pistols in the same week.
Dune II - basically the grandfather of every RTS game out there (and incidentally very, very different from Dune I): opposing forces, resource collection, tech tree, fog of war, et cetera. Or perhaps it was (not World of) Warcraft, it's been too long and memory gets fuzzy.
Battlefield 1942 introduced rideable vehicles to the maps.
Halo introduced regenerating health.
Elite was the first game to utilize procedural generation, which has been extremely popular across multiple genres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
While some might not consider it a game mechanic I certainly do, as gaming the proceduraly created levels is a core part of certain games, see mapping tactics in Diablo 2 for example as you use knowledge of procedural generation to reduce the time to find and kill bosses!
Why hasn't anybody named Worl of Warcraft? They definitely made a shift in the mmorpg scene..
Or Tomb Raider for the first big budget movie adaptation.
Gears: cover shooter
Prince of Persia: realistic animations with weight. also popularized a platformer subgenre, which was called cinematic platformer but unfortunately the life of the subgenre was cut short due to the advent of 3d.
Diablo: ARPG genre, and even more so loot rarity system (especially the four tiers common/rare/epic/legendary) and affixes in loot as well.
Half-Life: a lot of good things, sure, as pointed out by other comments, but I will also never forgive valve for popularizing the game not fucking starting for ages.
Rogue and maybe more so Nethack: roguelike mechanics.
some really obvious ones are Tetris: falling block puzzles and Sokoban: pushing block puzzles.
also now pretty much obsolete but Overwatch: loot boxes. they existed before, but Overwatch made them an industry standard.
Wasn't CS/TF2 far more influential in the lootbox department?
i don't think they were as influential no. overwatch loot boxes were not only a monetization venue but also the main leveling system. whether you paid or not you always played toward a loot box. and couple with the game's massive success and popularity it opened the floodgates to this form of monetization to be a standard.
CoD and Assassin's Creed popularised selling the same fucking game 20 times
FIFA and other sports games as well
Another one that comes to mind (that someone can correct me on). Was Uncharted the game that made the “no health bar, but redder screen as you are close to dying” popular?
Nah, CoD2 switched to health regen and dumped the health bar before them. It was partially to adapt to the console gameplay pioneered by, IIRC, Bungee with Halo.
Area 88 did something like that back in the SNES days.