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 played the very first one, saw how jank it was where volleys of archers couldn't take down a single chariot, and returned it to the game store.
The fact it's had so many sequels baffles me decades later.
Eh, that's just balance. They had many iterations since, especially in AOE2.
Yeah, it's balance that was offputting and looked silly in action from the start. Bad first impression.