First thing that came in to my mind was Gears of War with its specific third person view and hiding behind covers. I don't think it was the first game with that mechanic but the most influential one
The term I refer to is “hiding behind cover” singular - so when I hear “hiding behind covers” I think of the COG seeing locusts, getting scared, and wrapping themselves up in blankets. Lol
I think you need to be more specific than just "third person". Third person view was in Pong, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Centipede, etc. It's the default for most games.
First person was probably introduced with Battle Zone.
Which, I don't mean to sound pedantic, I just literally don't really know what you mean here.
If you are attempting to ask which game popularized 3d, third person shooters, then yes, the original Tomb Raider is probably the most early, widely popular game that popularized this.
Battlefield 1942 always stands out to me as the one that popularized large scale online battles on big maps with vehicles. At the time it was revolutionary in online gaming.
Command & Conquer: Renegade came out around the same time as well, with similar features. I kinda wish that game had a sequel as well.
Another gameplay feature that comes to mind is the exclamation/question mark above NPC characters for quests. I remember it first from WarCraft 3, but I think it really kicked off with World of WarCraft to get adopted by many more games.
I don't remember being possible to spawn on teammates in BF1942, but definitely remember it as a first to select spawn points on map like Battlefield always did.
I'm not sure I've ever had more fun with any game than I did with BF1942. It was just so much fun. There were games with smoother play and deeper mechanics and better graphics, but none were as fun. The dumb mechanics made it amazing, like being able to lie down on the wing of a plane and snipe people while your buddy flew, or dive bombing and parachuting out at 10ft above the ground to capture a point, or shooting the main cannon from a tank into a barracks that has 15 people spawned inside it, or piloting a goddamn aircraft carrier and running it aground to get to a spawn point safely. It was so stupid but so fun.
Donkey Kong (1981) popularized having different levels in a game to progress a storyline. Until then, you would have the same level over and over with increasing difficulty
The fact they used Navi to do the targeting really demonstrates how the devs felt they needed to explain the new mechanic and not just use it 'because game.'
I know the "hold a button to lock-on to an enemy" was in Mega Man Legends, but in the first game you had to stand still for the lock to work. On MML2, you could lock and run around freely, but that game came after OoT
Love oot, but the only thing it brought 3d too was the Zelda series. Didn't realize about the lock-on mechanic, would've sworn it was in earlier stuff, but I guess not.
Been RDFG since about 2002. One of my roommates in college was in the top thousand on Unreal Tournament. He talked me into it. God, I get good at that game playing against him.
I remember using wsad on an ascii graphics game I played back in 85 or so. I think it was called dungeons and dragons, but was not made by tsr. Larn, hack, and Moria were all similar games but I did not play those until later.
yeah HL definitely was the one popularized it as default. quake players changed the bindings for it; i know because i played that game with old-school doom/duke controls
Maybe cheating a bit but there are several genres of games that are named after the games that popularized their mechanics such as roguelike/roguelite, souls-like, metroidvania
I don’t think it’s just “being 3D”. Mario 64 put a lot of R&D into particulars of how jumping should work, the camera should work, and what the player’s goals should be. Quite a few games unintentionally copied them, while you could see some games not following their lead early in the 3D days that felt very janky to play. Tomb Raider could arguably be among them with the tank controls, though of course it has its own more niche appeal.
I think Spyro was the first mainstream game to standardise achievements, you could do random stuff in-game and it gave you a little pop up, carried over to Ratchet and Clank and now every game has official achievements
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.
They also said popularized, though. System Shock never really got beyond cult classic status, so while it invented them, I'd say BioShock popularized them.
Sports games have been doing it faaaar longer. Madden started in 1988, released a sequel in 1990, then hasn't missed a year ever since. The baseball and basketball counterparts existed just as long.
I'd argue that quake did far more for 3D graphics then it did for FPS. Like Doom is what got FPS into the spotlight even though Wolfenstein 3d came first. Like quake is pretty much what made real 3D possible and doable on the hardware of the time thanks to everything going on under the hood
Absolutely, we didn't even have any special graphics cards at the time for 3D, I believe? I remember that started some time around Quake 2 but I am not sure, I might remember wrong.
And then there was the Quake 2 engine which gave us Deus Ex, American McGee's Alice and then (through the modified GoldSrc version) Half-Life, Counter Strike and countless others! The family tree of 3D engines is really interesting.
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)
Yeah, you're right to highlight warcraft although I don't think it's a clean line with Warcraft between dune 2 and c&c. C&C was probably around 2 years into development by the time Warcraft came out, and my assumption is most of the actual game design was pretty finalised by that point. Though I'm sure some minor influences made their way in, I don't think Warcraft massively affected the kind of game we got in the end.
But yeah that's not to diminish the contribution of warcraft to the genre, there's loads of games that followed copying the Warcraft style of RTS, even as part of the c&c series in the end with Generals.
gonna be real, WC1 was not a huge title at the time. I think a lot of people look back, rightly, at WC3 being one of the greatest RTS of all time and then think the whole series was lauded at release, but Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was just okay.
Iirc (edit - apparently incorrect) Halo was the first to use left joystick as forward/backward and left/right strafe; and right joystick as look up/down and pivot left/right.
I even recall articles counting it as a point against the game due to its 'awkward controls' ...but apparently after a tiny learning curve, the entire community/industry got on board.
Goldeneye scheme was forward and back on the joystick moved forward and back but left and right on the stick turned the camera in that direction. The opposite movements were on the c buttons (strafe left and right and look up and down).
It was incredibly disorientating going from that to Turok which used the strafe on the c buttons and looking on the stick. It's the same feeling I now get when I try to go back to Goldeneye now that the other orientation has been made universal.
On a side note, the goldeneye controls allowed for a unique way of moving around the map with circle strafing that you can't really replicate in other games.
Goldeneye got it functional, but it was janky. Try playing 4p with the old N64 controllers and you’d sorta struggle to move and aim.
Halo updated the standard with something usable in modern games. I think a few games in that genre also set the expectation that weapons should have no aim penalty while strafing, since console players would use small strafing motions to do light aim correction.
I don’t know what game first came up with it, but Super Mario RPG was the first time I saw timed hits for attack and defense in a JRPG. While the mechanic isn’t exactly ubiquitous it has popped up in a handful of other games over the years and it always reminds me of that game.
Assassin’s Creed and the Open World Gameplay design. It definitely existed before then, but after AC came out, it felt like every RPG switched to the open world map.
There have been "open world" games since the 1980s. Just of course, memory limited how big that world could be, and how much you could do in it. The genre as a whole is ancient.
Rogue for the rogue mechanic.
Progressing in a game as far as you can until you die, then using some form of enhancement mechanic be harder faster better or stronger to go again.
Funny enough, Rogue doesn't have a set of permanent enhancement for a wider meta game. In Rogue you start over from scratch always and every time. That's the difference between a roguelike and a rogue liTe game. Binding of Isaac and Spelunky are roguelike. You die, you start over from scratch. Hades and Slay the spyre are rogue lite. Every run gives permanent enhancements that change the next runs, so each time you start slightly different or progressively better.
Hades, yes. That's a premier Roguelite with meaningful meta progression.
Slay the Spire is fuzzy on that point. I would not recommend it to someone looking for a Roguelite. It straddles the line in that it has very limited meta progression which is quickly exhausted and basically works as a tutorial. Once you've maxed out the card unlocks for each character it plays with the same feel as a Roguelike game. It's still not a pure a Roguelike since the starting boon choice and the card swap event allow some minor meta-influence between runs, but there's no more meta-progression.
A roguelite is ostensibly something that has enough features of a roguelike to be noted, but not enough to be considered one. And I'd argue there is way more to what makes a roguelike than permadeath with no meta progression.
Also Slay the Spire has less meta progression than Issac. Hades is in a whole nother ball park.
Be careful; you're stepping into a holy war. There are some who stick to "the Berlin Interpretation", where there are far more criteria to what makes a roguelike, and from my perspective, it makes those games so close to Rogue that it's not worth giving it its own genre, plus this classification came out just before Spelunky ruined it. Colloquially, you're typically right though. Most will call a game roguelite if your progress gives you upgrades that make the next runs easier, whereas a roguelike may still have unlocks that add more variety or "sidegrades" that are neither better nor worse.
I’m curious if it’s actually a different one. That’s the biblical “source” but I feel like there was a long gap before the indie scene picked up that theme in droves. I’m now unsure what it was that started that more modern trend.
Rogue was the originator, but NetHack and ADOM did more to popularize Roguelikes than Rogue itself ever managed. NetHack was the first one I ever heard of, and it's the only reason I know Rogue existed in the first place.
Jurassic Park: Trespasser invented physics engines in fps games as we know it. The game itself was a buggy mess and a financial disaster. The player's health was shown on the main character's boob for some damn reason. However, they did have the basics of a very good physics engine, and Valve took a lot of their ideas and incorporated it into Half Life 2.
Man, Trespasser is an example of a game with some pretty wild ideas about immersion and puzzle solving in a first person shooter game that the tech just wasn't quite able to pull off. If anyone is curious there is a positively antique Let's Play on YouTube that discusses the game's development, its relation to the wider Jurassic Park franchise, cut content, and, of course, the game in context. I think it may have come from the old Something Awful forums, and it remains, to my mind, the gold standard for what I'd like Let's Plays to be. Worth checking out if you've the time.
Spacewar! was a F2P PvP game with no microtransactions and no battle pass. Although it's hard to quantify exact player numbers (it precedes Steam charts), for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.
Its real-time graphics and multiplayer combat were very influential, and widely copied by many other games.
for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.
I see what you did there!
Space War history
SpaceWar is the first game to be frequently ported to different computers, back when computers took up a big portion of the room they sat it, and when "porting" was practically re-coding, from scratch, in Assembler.
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.
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.
Street Fighter 2 popularized and pretty much set to stone what a tournament fighter game should be. Mortal Kombat came first, but its single-player progression was this weird "tower" with some gimmick fights thrown in, like you vs 2.
Thinking about it, I'd say Mortal Kombat popularized the "REALLY fucking cheap sub boss/final boss" that many other fighting games have (looking at you, SNK) - I mean, good luck getting close to Goro in the first place.
I wonder which korean mmo could be considered as the one that de facto popularized pay-to-win as an integral mechanic.
Diablo hands down popularized not only the action RPG genre, but also having enemies as loot mystery boxes. One lucky kill and you could get your hands on a really great piece of equipment. The amount of clones speaks for itself.
I think Gran Turismo popularized the "carreer mode" of racing games.
Crush the Castle inspired Angry Birds and several other games with the same catapult mechanic. Loved that flash game way before Angry Birds was put on the App Store.
WASD + mouse aim in FPS. Wolf3d, Doom1 and Blakestone used the arrow keys, spacebar and Ctrl back in the day. The arrows were turn, not strafe too.
I reckon it was some friends of mine in the 90s in Box Hill, Melbourne, Victoria who were the first to use WASD/mouse aim. Share house above a shop at the end of a tram line.
Wolf3d is an evolution of Hovertank 3D, which had flat shading for walls, floors, and ceilings. Wolf3d then has textured walls but still flat shading on the floors and ceilings. Some other games came out after Wolf3d that had textures floors and ceilings while id worked on Doom.
Doom not only had textured everything, but also stairs. Trick was, you couldn't develop a level that had a hallway going over another hallway. Not enough computer horsepower yet to pull that off. This is sometimes called "2.5D".
Quake brings everything together. Everything's texture mapped, your levels have true height with things built over other things, and the character models are even fully 3d rendered.
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!
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.
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.
Even if it's not the first, I'd say it's the first that figured out that computers were powerful enough that you can have a gobsmackingly huge factory.
Oblivion popularized fucking DLC, holy fucking shit I hate DLC so fucking much I pirated any games that has DLC, I don't mind expansion but DLC can crash and burn in a pile of dogshit
So like... I don't get the hate for a specific method of providing content. Like, there's obviously a difference between Factorio's Space Age, and what The Sims does, even though they are both DLC.
Technically true, but I think everybody knows exactly what kind of dlc is meant, and because they still make up the majority of dlc content and addon-sized dlcs are so rare, it's fair to call them that.
Moneygrab empty dlcs ( shiny horse armor! ) are stupid, and history has shown that people are not fiscally responsible enough to not be lured into spending absurd amounts of money for very shallow or plain empty content. "Vote with your wallet" doesn't really work in the face of more and more insidious marketing efforts.
If you're counting the shields, Bungie's Oni did it first.
Halo also had vehicles in 2001. Bf1942 came out in 2002. Other FPS games have had vehicles before that, but they were always clunky. Hell, there's a vehicle section in Shadow Warrior(1997).
And also the concept of your collection of souls being recoverable from your last point of death.
I know the "death bag" mechanic had been done before, but the disappearing cache is a core element of Soulslike gameplay that has been repeated so many times since then. It adds a sense of urgency and FOMO to the recovery of your stuff. If you die again, it's gone for good.
I dispute the Serious Sam claim. The LucasArts iMUSE system was doing things like that years before. Even among fps games, the first Dark Forces game used it.
Don’t know if this counts, but Resident Evil 4 killed off the tank controls and single-handedly popularised third person cameras for survival horror games.
Resident Evil 4 still had tank controls, but it moved the camera behind the back. Unlike dual analog third person shooters at the time, it did have one major innovation: it moved the character to the left side of the screen so you could more easily see what's in front of you.
Not even just survival horror, RE4 was a landmark title just as a third-person action shooter. It had a huge influence on the generation of third person shooters that came after it.
You mean DotA 2, but DotA (warcraft 3 map) also popularized the MOBA genre. It wasn't the first MOBA however, as I believe that title belongs to an earlier StarCraft map called Aeon of Strife. But StarCraft didn't have a robust enough hero system for it to really catch on.
It sure feels like more than half of them label themselves as some blend of metroidvania, as long as it isnt a cardbattler or a roguelike, its 100% going to label itself a metroidvania.
I thought that the uproar about horse armor was that it was the first pay-to-win DLC. The armor was not just cosmetic but actually provided a stat boost to your horse. The accusation was that the developers had made it too easy for enemies to kill your horse and decided to patch the game to fix it but made players pay for the patch.
It was the beginning of the end, because they saw how much money they made on the horse armour vs how much effort it took to make it. It was actually generally criticized at the time, but it also sold really well.
Jonathan S. Harbour of the University of Advancing Technology argues that Tomb Raider (1996) by Eidos Interactive (now Square Enix Europe) is "largely responsible for the popularity of this genre".
Hell, Max Payne was definitely more popular, and it came out in 2001.
Well you are right but I'm talking about the style and feel that one of those earlier pivot resident evils created. It plays the same as gears of war and all other cover shooters that followed. Sure third person existed but everything today plays in a way that series established.
I wonder what the source of the RTS conventions was. Ctrl num for making groups. Double press to centre on group. X for scattering units. A to stop them. Pretty sure these predate C&C but the only one before that I can think of is dune.
Maybe because that one didn't come from videogames. Selection sets or groups have been a thing on UI for a long time, ever since vertex editor on CAD software.
But WoW didn't really do anything new, just bigger, better, with a lot more funding. Everquest and Ultima Online did everything first, they just didn't have that Blizzard money.
Sure, credit where credit is due, but profits and reached audience are also very valid benchmarks eventhough they are evil capitalist terms. History is full of inventions that didn't take off until some big corporation took interest in it.
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”.
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.
100 coins = 1UP and warp zones? And... you think they're from Crash Bandicoot?
Well, when I was writing that, after midnight I will add, I had this feeling that Mario was doing this thing earlier but for me Mario stands as an icon for the first level design overall as a golden standard for introduction to mechanics and really efficient use of memory for data, and one of the first uses of dynamic music.. So you are totally right, Mario brought a lot of things, I’ve just played Crash much more.
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. .
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.
The question was, "what games popularized certain mechanics." The question was not, "what games created or introduced certain mechanics."
Yes, there were other MMOs before WoW, but WoW took MMOs to a completely new level of popularity. I didn't play ANY MMOs before WoW and wasn't really interested to, but it was so popular that I jumped on to see what the deal was. Since then I have played ESO, LOTRO, AOC, and one other whose name I forget.
Other MMOs were popular among gaming nerds before WoW, but WoW made MMOs popular to normal people.
I tried UO, AC, EQ1+2 and can say that WoW's beloved IP, look and feel, and relative lack of clunkiness in the controls and animations were big differentiators for me.
because it's flat out wrong. WoW aped most of its systems from Everquest, which most of WoW's development team was actively playing. They made some improvements on the genre, but the bones existed as early as 1997 with Ultima Online.
Yeah, however before Warcraft there was Dune II. But I am not sure which one was more popular at the time and I think Dune II came way before Warcraft.
I think why Dune II is more notable though is that the first Dune game was more of an adventure style came, not a strategy game. Then they changed the game with its successor and introduced the asymmetrical factions that each had a few unique units with differing strategies.
Warcraft took that concept further of course. But even there its rather Warcraft II that really had a big breakthrough.
Depends on how you constrain that idea. Open worlds were a very early idea, but old computers were somewhat capacity limited in how much content you could have.
Here you had several town maps, including dual carriageways, main roads, side roads, one way streets. And you could just drive down any of them. They were all nondescript, but the amount of memory really limited what could be done.
There was also the games using the freescape engine. Driller, Darkside and Total Eclipse. These were all about as open world as you could achieve on the hardware of the time.
In terms of "open world" the definition is open to interpretation. I'd argue that text based adventures were open world too in their own way. So it really depends on what features people agree makes an "open world" game as to what the first game that contains all those features was.
Could even say it goes back to the Zelda games on NES. Metroidvania games might also count. Those games all have the "you might progress in any available direction" mechanic, which IMO is the core of the open world mechanic.
There's also some games like Star tropics where the whole world was open (as in you could return to previous locations) but progress was more linear.
Would super Mario world count as open world? Not as old as the NES ones I mentioned, but I'm curious. Or say if you could go back to previous worlds in SMB3, would that be open world?
Open world RPGs were always the goal, old games tried to mask the hardware limitations by using several techniques. By the time the Witcher 3 came along open world RPGs were the most common thing, in fact at the time lots of people called the Witcher a sellout because of that, it's like if it had come up a couple years ago and had base buildiechanics, EVERYONE else was doing it.
There are LOTS of examples that pre-date TW3, I'll limit myself to a few, just because it's the ones I played. In the 90s and early 2000s I used to play Ultima Online, which is an MMO from 97 that has a vast open world. But if you want first person, Oblivion is old enough to drink.
In a way, I'd say World of Warcraft (2004 onwards) popularized that.
Here's your starting place. Here's a bunch of easy quests and monsters.
You quit the starting area. Everything feels huge and really, really fucking far away. One step in the wrong direction and you're assaulted by an enemy with a 💀 for a level. Not only that, most people would only see the loading screen once before doing an hours-long playthrough and that also increased the sense of "fucking huge world"
I think the fault lies with Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed. They really championed the idea of a bloated open world stuffed with systems that don't really interact with each other, and now AAA gaming just keeps trying to stuff more mechanics in the pile.
Single-handedly? Nah. It pulled a lot of existing ideas together though, and it's certainly responsible for the popularity. Another Minecraft influence is early-access.
Dark Souls popularized the stamina meter and the "dropping all your money on death and having to go pick it back up" mechanic. Not to mention spawning a subgenre of similar games like Lies of P and Lords of the Fallen
The first Dark Souls was 2011.
Diablo was released in 1997.
World of Warcraft was 2004 and while you didn't quite drop all your stuff and money you die you did have to run back to your corpse to keep from having all your stuff degrade and cost a bunch of money.
The first Sonic was 1991 and getting hit makes you drop all your "money" and have to pick it back up.
It isn't a question of who did it first, it's a question of who made it popular. Look at how many games have a death run since DS came out. Hollow Knight, Nioh, Blasphemous, etc. It's also not the same mechanic as losing your items on death.
Dark Souls is literally just Legend of Zelda for adults, which had a stamina system at about the same time Kings Field did. It's honestly hilarious to me that it became known as the father of the genre, but the immediate copycats were also aiming for a similar tone to FromSoftware so I guess it's fair.
I feel like Call of Duty 4 modernized and standardized the FPS genre on at least consoles. Every call of duty game still looks and feels exactly the same since CoD4 and every other first person shooter copied it's control scheme because it was so firmly cemented.