Had yet another thought, I think there's a good argument to be made that a lot of game developers/companies jumped on the motion controls train with the advent of the Wii, Wii Sports being the obvious poster child here.

Agar.io and browser MMOs on .io domains
Skylanders and figurines doubling as DLC (Amiibo, Disney Infinity, Starlink)
Pokemon Go and mobile AR games, mostly based on preexisting brands

Unfortunately I cannot read so apologies if my suggestions have already been said.

Really seconding Ace Attorney pushing the narrative for detective games; there are a lot of point-and-click investigative games like Danganronpa, AI: The Somnium Files, Paradise Killer... but in the same vein Danganronpa influenced the genre of "death games," such as World's End Club - although they were both spearheaded by Kodaka! Danganronpa also seeps through Kimi ga Shine. All in all I would say that Ace Attorney is the common ancestor of these games.

Oh, here's a fun one! Pokemon Snap and photography games. Most recently, Umurangi Generation and Toem...

Given that Afrika was developed by Sony, I think it's fair to say they drew a lot of inspiration from Snap too.

added wii sports/motion control minigame collections, agar.io/low commitment browser MMOs, and skylanders/toys-to-life. also went ahead and added gears/TPS, I was so hung up on the cover system and trying to find proper cover shooters that aped it before I realized that while RE4 deserves a lot of credit, really all post-gears TPS games were trying to be gears. dunno why that took me so long to realize lol

also clearing up a point I made previously regarding the retro throwback stuff: I rattled off some games in my last post with no explanation, and what I meant to say is that all of those predated mega man 9. which doesn't have to do with NSMB really but I'm not sure NSMB is responsible for those as much as XBLA existing was.

-modern survival games: I don't play a lot of these but my gut instinct is that a lot of these drew from DayZ, and upon doing some cursory searching it seems that those titles you mentioned are split between DayZ-style survival and Minecraft-style. I think that's indicative that neither is a hingepoint for their descendents, though I could stand corrected. there's also probably room for a survival/crafting/building wave of games from minecraft including Terraria and Dragon Quest Builders, but I'd need a second opinion on that.
-pokemon go/mobile AR games: initially I agreed and started gathering examples, but most of the ones I found are also by Niantic. the only main one I found that wasn't was Jurassic World Alive. if other examples exist that aren't Niantic I'd happily add it though
-ace attorney/detective games: I still agree that DR follows heavily in AA's footsteps, but only to the extent that it uses the contradiction logic puzzles. if we're talking japanese detective games in general, AA is just one in a long legacy of titles leading all the way back to The Portopia Serial Murder Case in the early 80s (see also: Jake Hunter, Kojima's pre-MGS work, The Silver Case). I actually had to sit down and watch some footage of AI to get a feel for it (my wires were totally crossed and I thought it was a swery65 game for some reason) only for it to remind me of zero escape before I found out it was directed by the zero escape guy so in that case, I think there's a different notable ancestry that doesn't necessarily hinge upon AA (chunsoft ofc is also known for their VN/adventure titles far predating AA). paradise killer I'm also not very familiar with but from what I've read it seems like it downplays the actual courtroom stuff a fair bit, and that's still the main mechanical innovation of AA, so I'm still not quite convinced it should be going on here.
-pokemon snap/photo games: afrika is def a great example, but I'm not sure outside of that there's really a lot of evidence that snap itself had a wide or notable influence in the years immediately following its release. I'd be really stretching it to mention Fatal Frame or Michigan: Report From Hell for example. there's also the similar Gekisha Boy series that predates snap... what I'm trying to get across is that there's definitely a photography game throughline, but it's hard for me to say if snap itself is a proper genre hingepoint or massively influential outside of simply being a pokemon game

also I went ahead and updated the description to perhaps clarify the internal rules I'm using in my head. sorry for being picky... but thank you everyone for the recs!

Ah, I was basing the 'ancestor' argument given the time constraints of a decade!

As for AA itself, I personally find the courthouse sequences to be the fulfilling climax and not the main mechanic. This is probably why I call all of these three imitators without hesitation? I find that the contradiction mechanic, backdrop of murder, visual novel-slash-deductive work is what makes all of these three so very similar and echoing of each other, which AA popularized. In my opinion!

I think that's a valid view, and one that likely many other westerners hold, but it's contingent on our perception of ace attorney popularizing such tropes in the west. to many of us (myself for sure) the ace attorney's popularity on the exceedingly popular DS helped introduce us to the conventions of japanese adventure games: first-person view, examining environments point-and-click style, asking questions of NPCs, and collecting clues. however, in japan these mechanics were long established, hence all of the examples I cited in my previous comment.

ace attorney's actual innovation comes from the courtroom sequences, and more specifically the contradiction puzzles. while those don't necessarily define the experience for everyone, those are the main mechanics that distinguish AA from previous titles in the genre. that's why I can safely say that DR is in the mold of AA: it features the exact same alternating investigation/courtroom structure and uses a similar logic puzzle construction (sections of testimony organized into discrete statements, with evidence items being used on a particular statement in order to invalidate it). obviously DR does its own things as well with the radically unique setting and prisoner's gambit theme to the courtroom, but it's obviously building from AA as a base.

with the others... while there's certainly similarities and throughlines, it's just not enough to single out AA as a singular point of origin for the others. in some cases the mechanical similarity has been explicitly denied: take for example this RPG Site interview with AI:TSF director Kotaro Uchikoshi, where when asked if the game's investigation sections are similar to ace attorney, he states that "[he] wouldn't really compare it to the Ace Attorney series" and instead says it was an attempt to modernize Policenauts, one of the kojima games I mentioned earlier. in another interview he cites two other games: the aforementioned suda51 title The Silver Case as well as jp-only eroge VN EVE Burst Error. that's just one example, but I think the proof is there to show that the adventure game heritage that AI:TSF draws from extends beyond simply AA. paradise killer may have more ties, since the developers are western and thus likely experienced AA before many other examples of the genre like we did, but 1) the trial seems to be briefer and not have the same back-and-forth contradiction gameplay and 2) the game came out over 15 years after AA's release in the west, so I wouldn't say it tips the scale towards saying that AA caused a detective/lawyer game fad or anything of the sort.

in a way that's good! it's a positive thing to say that these games each have distinct properties that make them not just carbon copy cutouts of a given prior game (like I said, DR provides enough twists on the AA formula to make it worthwhile as an individual experience even if it was definitely looking off of AA's paper). but this list is mainly to document those titles that explicitly jumped on a trend that happened to be popular or influential, and less so about games with nuanced webs of inspiration or in long lineages of mechnical evolution.

Speaking of Japanese adventure games, I believe it's 1999's Kanon that really formalizes the style of "visual novel" that Renpy is built to make copies of, as well as the oft-parodied-and-otherwise-imitated "dating sim" structure that takes the "sim" part out (like you'd see in Angelique or Tokimeki Memorial) in favor of learning to navigate branching hardcoded story paths. And it's definitely 1992's Otogirisou that launches the "sound novel" style of big blocks of text over still images that forms the backbone of works like the When They Cry series, or Fate/Stay Night, or To Heart (a bridge between it and Kanon.)

I haven't played/read any of these, haha.

@Chwoka I'm inclined to agree, I would just need examples since my VN knowledge is already even way less than my shaky japanese adventure game knowledge

shmups are an enormous can of worms as far as clones go

R-Type kickstarted a fuckton of horizontal-scrolling shmup clones with alien-inspired imagery and mechanics where you control a detatchable pod. The ones that immediately come to mind are Pulstar, Xexex, and Wings of Bluestar.

In terms of games that spawned design philosophies/genres, Ultima Underworld probably deserves a mention. Doug Church & Looking Glass Studios didn't actually coin the term "immersive sim" until the late 90s, but Ultima Underworld's retroactively considered to be the first example of that kind of game. Among others, System Shock (and by extension Prey 2017), Thief, Deus Ex, Dishonored and especially Arx Fatalis all claim descent from it.

Dune II gets my vote as well. It wasn't the first RTS, but it's considered to be the archetypal one. Stuff which borrowed from it in some capacity includes Command & Conquer (same devs), Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Warcraft, Dawn of War, arguably Total War, etc.

great choices y'all. ultima underworld threw me for a second bcs all of the good early examples are from looking glass but I think I assembled a decent list with some variety even with not being able to use thief/system shock (I'll count deus ex as technically a different team even though iirc ion storm austin had a lot of origin and looking glass people).

Yeah I kind of forgot about the 'no same developers' rule when I typed that out lol, VTMB's a solid pick. I don't know if Troika ever referred to it as one themselves, but it's definitely much more in line with the likes of Deus Ex than other arguably-sorta-semi-adjacent stuff that people sometimes include (like Hitman or The Elder Scrolls).

Can Bayonetta be really called an imitator? Both were created by Kamiya

@mutyumu it's def dicey on that one but I chose it for a few reasons

1) a very clear-cut example compared to any one of the character action-adjacent ps2 titles I could've chosen
2) technically a different team (sort of along the same lines as the looking glass/ion storm austin example I delineated for ultima underworld)
3) devil may cry itself is a product of kamiya's studio 4 team that later got moved to itsuno and his team in the arcade division. they made their own updates and changes to the formula that kamiya and platinum used as a reference when they created bayonetta (iirc kamiya said one of the first things he did in preproduction was play devil may cry 4). so it's a weird example of reflexive inspiration between a creator of the original work and the thing his work morphed into after he moved on.

definitely a ymmv on whether you think it's valid given the rules, but it's just as easy to sub it out with one of the many other character action examples (including from platinum itself) that I figure it's easiest to go with an example everyone can instantly recognize

@Pangburn Fair enough! Kamiya said he got inspired to make Bayonetta because even after Ninja Gaiden and God of War were released 3-4 years later, they were still compared to the original Devil May Cry so he got really excited and competitive.

I also remember him saying that he liked the direction Itsuno took with Devil May Cry 3 and saying it inspired him to work in Bayonetta.

I think it was in this documentary/interview series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmqZtu_v044

I was surprised to see how humble he is in interviews compared to his Internet persona lmao

Virtual boy games like Mario's Tennis were some of the first VR games (this is a joke but it'd be funny if it got on the list

@HylianBran was about to say predated by that super rare atari jaguar vr prototype but apparently that was at the '95 winter consumer show after the virtual boy had already released... very sad...

Have a few suggestions
Destiny - looter-shooters with MMO elements (The Division, Anthem, Marvel's Avengers (not a shooter but blatantly inspired by it)
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Sword of Light - basically invented strategy JRPGs
Mega Man 9 - retro throwback platformers (Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth, Shovel Knight, Sonic Mania)
Clash of Clans - F2P mobile strategy games designed around building bases and multiplayer

oh wait you already dismissed MM9 my b

I think there was also a cancelled VR thing for genesis, not sure if I'm remembering wrong

Hey, just remembered this list again and maybe you could add Minecraft for voxel open world building games? Examples would be like Terraria, Dragon Quest Builders, Starbound, etc

added that @Drax, plus another one relayed on discord. I got yours a while back @TheRealBigC btw, sorry for not posting about it

Pokemon GO which popularizes mobile AR games, and games that were spawned are The Witcher: Monster Slayer, Minecraft Earth, and Jurassic World Alive.

i think Destiny is an Warframe imitator

A good list. There are probably a few ideas I would add, but one that stands out is Wizardry. First-person, grid-based dungeon crawler RPGs. Pretty much the forefather of a genre that's still around to some capacity. Ex: Megami Tensei, Etrian Odyssey, Legends of Grimrock, The Dark Spire.

sorry for taking so long to update this...

@Miquiztli yep those are exactly the kind of suggestions I needed to fill out that entry. pokemon go has been added
@Sinfa_Townfeldt certainly notable enough to mention at least. I added a note about it in the destiny entry
@MendelPalace yup, that's a good one. added