This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net ‘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.
I almost mentioned not liking Halo from the very first game when it first came out, finding it clunky and chunky and having controls that made me feel like an armed refrigerator with tank treads equipped with a camera and the story being both flag-humping hoo-rah apologia and a pretentious mess that was only wearing the peeled off skin of the Marathon series, but I’d get soooo much shit so I waited for someone to say it first.
I never really caught much of the lore. It seemed like pretty standard military action stuff.
The music from the original demos was incredible. I’m pretty sure the music was what propelled the original game from meh shooter to a genre favorite.
I won’t knock the music, but your assessment of the lore isn’t really missing anything.