EDIT: the former first line in my post sucked ass.
In the early 80's came space invaders, defender and such, so that can be though as the starting point, where it all began before them there hardly was any gamingcommunities. Second coming was the induction of nintendo as a more economical gaming platform. Third coming was rts by dune2 or more significantly C&C and all sorts of adventure games. Then came the doom which is to gaming as water is to life, essential! It's been said that some firms had a noticeable phase when doom effected their employers efficiency of work.
After that was the time for the indifferent tryouts and failures for making platforming into 3d(frogger, pandemonium etc), which was not perfected until mario 64 in 1996. At the same time there was tomb raider with a bit different approach to the game design but mario 64 was unarguably the first and most complete 3d platformer.
After that there hasn't been that much of a development of game's actual structure. The basic consept has remained the same and only minor adjustments have been made. You say that 3d shooters have evolved? Well there is a gun and some sort of a crosshair and then there are hordes of enemies that splatter in front of the forementioned gunbarrel. That's the consept and after doom only the execution has been evolved with the content's being basically the same. The only new type of games are rpg and arcade rpg(as in baldurs gate and diablo), but both of them appeared in the late 90's and basically all the games that have come after 1998 have been a newly revisioned version of something that has already been made.
Other significant games would include:
Thief: Introduced stealth gameplay
System shock 2: More complex story driven shooters(deus ex, half life, all the modern fps)
Descent: Space shooter with near 3d graphics
Mortal Kombat: fighting game
and probably some driving game, but since they are all the same game with the only difference being damage or no damage to the car, therefore you can put your favourite game here. If it's produced a decade ago, it will bear just as much significanse as does every cargame before or after. Minus the carmageddon 2, of course, since it kicked ass!!!!
EDIT: oh, and rpgs started with the rogue and rpg with ascii graphics was probably perfected with nethack or adom, though the latter was completed like 10 years after it's icons.
