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.

Im pretty sure the actual, physical Trading card games like MtG and Pokemon gave us all these games with card mechanics in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Culdcept (1997), Baiten Kaitos (2003), Kingdom Hearts - Chain of Memories (2004). Then the card games weren't as popular for a bit, then the digital ones died out.

And then Blizzard released Hearthstone in 2014. I haven't played the other ones to know for sure, but I believe Yu-Gi-Oh Master duels crafting system can directly trace it's roots to it. Trade cards for dust of a specific rarity, dust from 3 can form a new card, Shiny cards give enough dust on their own for any card, etc. .

Gothic had NPC pathfinding and behavior routines before Bethesda did it with Morrowind (and Gothic did it better).

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”.