What do you think?
Long before it released Halo — four years before, to be exact — Bungie released a real-time strategy game entitled Myth: The Fallen Lords that evolved that genre as surely as Halo evolved the first-person shooter.
Sometimes referred to as a real-time tactics game, Myth dispensed with any Command & Conquer-style resource management: it gave you a mixed bag of units of varying abilities, anywhere from a squad to an army, and that was what you had to defeat the enemy.
Myth took place in a three-dimensional environment — you observed the battlefield from a godlike vantage point above it, zooming your point of view up and down and around as needed, controlling units one by one or en masse as they duked it out on magnificently geological-looking landscapes.