History books
record the famous. This is not the same as the famous neccesarily mattering more than any one of the unknowns, let alone all of them at the same time.
You can easily see this in microcosm when, for example, looking at the microcosm of a developing metagame in a video game- the person who
invented a strategy may well go completely unknown, with people being able to name who
popularized it but not who
created it.
Or we can look at various more recent history patterns. I'm familiar with a lot of game stuff broadly, so for example I can point out that far more people knew about Doom than Castle Wolfenstein, even though the latter came first and the former merely refined it. Or look at Warcraft 3, which was hailed as a visionary combination of RTS and RPG mechanics, and as the
Wikipedia page tells me, came out in July of 2002.
Warlords Battlecry, on the other hand, came out in July of 2000. And thus did it before Warcraft 3, and frankly better.
Lords of Magic is more of a greyzone, and came out another 3 years sooner.
Sacrifice is also a far better RPG/RTS hybrid than Warcraft 3. It came out in November of 2000.
Dungeon Keeper is also a blending of RTS and RPG mechanics. It came out in 1997, like Lords of Magic.
Warcraft 3, of course, 'invented' the RTS/RPG hybrid genre, according to most people.
I can name off the top of my head, as I just did, four games that did it first. I'm not counting either Dungeon Keeper 2 nor Warlords Battlecry 2 which both came out before Warcraft 3, incidentally.
More debatably,
Total Annihilation: Kingdoms came out in 1999 and
also is an RTS wherein you have a powerful central hero unit. Not even counting the original Total Annihilation which is even older.
Of course, with the wonders of the internet I can provide easy evidence of the timeline, but that only furthers my point- people
think of Warcraft 3 as some brilliant, revolutionary Great Man Video Game that invented a novel concept, but while it certainly drew imitators, even limiting myself to
real time strategy games with such RPG elements, it was beaten to the punch
multiple times. Sacrifice and Warlords Battlecry in particular are indisputable, having levelable hero units and otherwise being relatively traditional RTSes.
But in spite of Warcraft 3
not actually inventing the concept, that's what people falsely think of it as doing. And if we didn't have as good of records as we do on the releases of these games,
that's what the history books would say. Falsely. With no connection to reality.
While there's certainly things Warcraft 3 did that were unique, it's not actually that notable a game in terms of inventing ideas, nor in quality design or execution. But it was popular, and well known, so a lot of people thought it did, even though in reality it may well have been outright aping some of these prior games, and was certainly not actually first to the idea.
And games are not somehow unique in this. Often, when you go digging, people who are experts on a time period, region, and topic of technology, politics, or so forth will firmly and
consistently disagree with the mainstream layman's history takes on these things. People that are 'literally who?' to you or I will be agreed as far more important to the way things went down than Famous General MCFamous Generalton everyone has heard of, and so forth.