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It's more accurate to say that HL popularised story driven FPS games, before that we had plenty of FP arena shooters with no real storytelling.

GoldenEye 007 for N64 came out the year before HL and was pretty popular and had a good campaign mode.

"Firsts" are often a bit fuzzy.

There was also Unreal, but its story delivery was almost entirely through datapads you would pick up and read.