There was that game that was based on physics extensively and I'll be damned if I know their game.
You had to control your arm manually and you could tell the state of your health by looking down to your breasts (the player assumed the role of the woman). While there are some rather perverse undertones to it, I think that wasn't a that bad of an idea.
It was supposedly set on a island with veliciraptors. The gameplay was supposedly horrible because it relied too much on controlling physics that were bad.
However, ever since then, more and more features are taken from this game, just often not enough or not the right ones. For example, minimal HUD or ragdolls.
The gameplay might have been shit, but the fact that it actually tried to integrate physics into the gameplay rather than just use it as a gimmick like everyone else does nowadays, is admirable.
The thing is, that innovation isn't that good a thing. Innovation means taking something that was already made and trying to slightly change it to make better (or worse). It is modification, not creation.
Therefore, I hate it when people use this term, precisely because they misunderstand what it really means. It means recycling old ideas, not making new ones.
If you want to see the true source of inventive gameplay, you will most likely have to go and play very obscure and unsuccessful games. Inventive gameplay is discouraged in the games industry, especially today.
I would have to say the Final Fantasy series for starting the trend of including orchestral scores into video games. Whether you like or dislike Final Fantasy you have to agree that the music in these games are quite impressive. I would have to imagine that they might have influenced games such as World of Warcraft and Age of Conan in that sense.
In other words, they made every two-nick marketeer hire expensive composers and orchestras to make music for games that didn't really needed them or where electronic (or just cheaper) music would have been perfectly fine (or even better).
