Games

People always forget that resident evil 4(? There is a million of them) made third person shooters mainstream.

This might be a little on the side of the main topic but there was always something cool about Crash Bandicoot 100 Apples > 1 Life, and you could grind more to make some levels more forgiving, like semi-adjustable difficulty level based on your previous approach.. And later on — warp zones, you get to choose from a few options so the progression has variation.

Another thing that comes to mind, not sure if a first game to do it, THPS for unlocking movies and later cheat codes, modes and characters for finishing the career. Plus the whole gap marathon for Private Carrera.

Oh, and chanting from Oddword where it had various uses, for saving friends or for changing into enemies, or using special abilities. This definitely was something, because I still remember thinking as a kid, “how cool is that this one ability has so many different uses”.

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone say Pokemon. From a. monster collecting/battle game nothing has really came close.

Kinda wild to see nobody mention System Shock, the game that invented audio logs. It may seem quaint in retrospect, but at the time all shooters were in the vein of Doom, and story in a shooter was considered "like story in porn." System Shock was not only the first to communicate the plot and next steps to the player through found audio logs, but it also filled the player in on side stories and provided characterization to the survivors on Citadel station.

The game recently got a remaster, and despite very few gameplay changes, still holds up really well in 2024. You can really see the bones of later games in it, such as story focused shooters like Bioshock or F.E.A.R. and I'd really recommend it to anyone interested in playing a great retro game.

For first person shooters (mix of first introduced and popularised):

Doom: started and popularised the genre. Also started and popularised rasterized 3d graphics for gaming (though the game itself was still 2d). Also first fps multiplayer and modding

Quake: various game modes (Deathmatch, capture the flag), as well as being the first true 3d fps. Popularised multiplayer and modding.

Team fortress (quake mod): Different specialist characters.

Goldeneye 64: popularized multilayer console fps, taught character size can be a significant advantage/disadvantage, depending on if you got Oddjob or Jaws.

Half-life: started horror fps genre, (mostly) seemless world

CS: customizable loadouts instead of search for guns each time you spawn, more game modes

UT: AI bots

Perfect dark: secondary fire for weapons

Deus ex: rpg fps

Halo: finally figured out a decent controller control scheme (one stick looks, one moves, button for grenades rather than needing to select grenade from list of guns). First fps I remember vehicles in, too.

Battlefield: large scale multiplayer

Socom: fps game that isn't first person, online console multiplayer

Call of duty: using gun sights to aim

Far cry: open world fps

Doom 3: used lighting (or lack thereof) to bring fps horror to a new level.

Crisis: famous for pushing hardware and people caring more about the benchmark results than the game itself (I tried the second one, it was ok but I didn't really get into it)

Call of duty: zombies (and other alternate game modes), kill steaks, online progression (unlocking guns and attachments as you level, prestige levels)

HL2/portal: brought physics and its involvement in fps games to a new level

TF2: f2p, microtransactions (though not predatory or p2w so the game isn't remembered for this)

Borderlands: loot-based fps rpg

Metro 2033: fps survival

Halo reach: custom maps

Destiny: MMORPG FPS

Overwatch: hero-based, and hero roles (dps, tank, healer)

Pub bg: battle Royale

I'm not 100% sure if factorio was the first, but the devs at Wube certainly perfected the idea and now there's a whole market for the "factory game" genre.

Minecraft singlehandedly created a genre called “Survival”.

I think most of the games around 2005’s Indie Game Boom created lots of brilliant mechanics that’s been copied still.