I’m not young. But 25 years after the hype, I am finally getting around to playing half life (1)! Stupidly missed the free action, but paid a few eurocents for it. They’re totally worth it! Awesome game, holds up very very well after two and a half decades!
For me Unreal already filled that place. Of course HL amped it up to 11, but Unreal already had decent story elements for that time. I loved how you could track the fate of fellow survivors over multiple levels at several occasions. The lore strewn around. Reading the log of a guard who you just blew to smithereens and finding out they were handed a crap posting, making you almost feel sorry for him.
The way and scale of how HL handed the story was absolutely novel and something else, but it most definitely wasn’t the first to include story elements.
Most definitely not true. Just from the top of my head 1997’s MDK springs to mind and the before mentioned Unreal also had nothing to do ‘with shooting sprites and collecting keys’.