I remember the first video game I've played: 'Dave'.
Since then there was lots of games created but some of them was more influence on the trend.
I think these games had lots of influence on the games improvement trend:

1. Age of Empires: since it was such a well designed strategic game which is still popular among its fans specially the programmers.
2. Max Payne: since it used a really different graphical engine which was provided by 'Slow motion' technology. It's feature affects lots of games after that.
3. Prince of Persia: since it was designed in such a way that you could do lots of actions just with 2 or 3 keys. Instead of having lots of keys for each action there was 2 or 3 keys and the many of actions was doable by combinations of these keys.

In the recent years I've not played any new video game since I have not such time while involving with my work. But currently I've seen a new generation of games which was really interesting for me. These kinds of games is available for touch mobiles. One of them is 'Air Traffic' which is really shocking for me. In these games despite of the other games, there is no action. You should specify the paths and drawing them on the touch screen. This is a new thinking style I think.
Instead of having some actions and doing them so fast you suppose to draw smart arcs on the screen