Redefined?

So, I follow some numpty who pretends to be 'Ghost' from Modern Warfare 2. He asked:

"What game do you think redefined first person shooters?"

I got a little flustered over this. This is the question I despise. Because, sure, you might have had the few who redefined ONE aspect of the genre, but they all boil down to the same thing. Run, shoot and don't die first. They've all done it a little differently in the past, but I'll spare you a tangent and just copy-paste my answer on the Facebook Fan page.

"Now, you can't say ONE game redefined the genre. They all did different things.

Wolfenstien 3D started it off, by introducing us to a style of game that put us in th

e perspective of the character, instead of looking at it.
Doom evolved this, and Quake and Duke 3D evolved it further.

Quake would probably be the one most people say, as it introduced the break neck speed and

addictive multiplayer that many other games tried and probably succeeded in doing too.
But as the times went on, you have the whole "multiplayer only" games, that just sent them into a rut.

Half Life saved the day by introducing story along with a pretty different style of combat.

(Combining both alien/exotic weapons with the realistic

weapons.)
It was also the Counter Strike mod to that game that redefined gun play, by

mixing both the speeding gameplay of the older games, with the 'realistic' method of killing each other, (any gun can kill with one shot to the head, etc.)

Later on, you had Halo. It was an expansive game, with the story and gameplay, epic set pieces and some of the best graphics at the time. It changed up the style of how health and weapons worked, one of the first games to introduce a melee attack without having to switch weapons. People say that redefined the genre. Y'know, since every game and it's dog copied the premise until Halo 3's buzz stopped.

But then, it was all a little meh.

Then history sort of repeated itself. (Half Life 2, Quake 4, Counter Strike Source, Doom 3, Halo 2, etc.) And there

were a FUCK load of WW2 shooters.

Then we leave that era, and we come to what we are in now. You have CoD, BF:BC, TF2, MW2, L4D, etc.

Now, Call of Duty never really redefined anything. It was a run of the mill WW2 shooter until 4, it just did what it did, to top quality. But what the franchise did redefine is multiplayer, it is probably the next in line of the "Games that redefined Multiplayer." With a RPG style of levelling, and an expansive selection of guns for you to spawn with, (although Counter Strike had a variation on this,) and not find around the map, ala, Half Life, Halo.
It also redefined what is the new hip thing to do in FPS games, Modern Warfare styled things.

But you have to consider what Left 4 Dead did for co-operative gameplay, and then TF2 too.

But yeah, just a little thought.

TL;DR : There is no SPECIFIC game that redefined the genre. Also I'm a geek. A huge one. Shu'up."