What’s the antithesis of Arrested Development, Firefly or The Big Lebowski? Those may never have ‘found their audience’ but over time seemed to recognised by everyone. What are the deep cuts that you liked but it feels like everyone has completely forgotten they even existed.
Honestly, I’d say that Splinter Cell is considered to have had a larger impact on gaming than it really did. For example, you claim that Splinter Cell was the first game where lighting mattered - at the very least, Thief: The Dark Project featured that very prominently, four years earlier, but I doubt that was even the first.
Splinter Cell basically just copied Thief and Metal Gear Solid’s homework and changed it up a bit, I’d say it’s inferior to both games, and yet is often considered to be one of the best games ever made.
It’s common to see misattribution like this happen woth media, and it’s really not a big deal that someone is caught unaware. Like Thief actually does get a lot of praise and did impact gaming, but it’s easy for someone to not know of it depending on who they talk to.
But the worst example is several users and a couple YouTube essayist claiming Assassin’s Creed 2 was revolutionary, when it was basically doing nothing new, and was just ironing out the formula that was 99.99% established by a game that seemingly none of them heard of called… Assassin’s Creed 1.
Halo is the game I always think of. There’s a much cooler alternate universe where Red Faction was delayed six months and was an Xbox launch title.