This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
The game was written in the Post-9/11 USA, so that vibe was absolutely intended. The aliens are a religious caste system that hate Humanity’s freedoms, Master Chief is a based Navy Seal, etc. As time went on they started playing with the idea that the human government was really fashy but because they never fully committed to the idea and had Master Chief defect to a Maoist insurgency it comes off like they’re endorsing the awful things in the setting rather than condemning them.
Halo had been in development for years and came out two months after 9/11, any relation to post-9/11 politics was just a coincidence.