It's difficult to overstate just how big Konami's 1994 dating sim Tokimeki Memorial was for the Japanese game industry. It made a niche genre mainstream, and became the blueprint for the visual novels that would follow. It was so ubiquitous in its day that even the Nintendo devs working on Super Mario 64 were obsessed with it.
Buried deep in Super Mario 64's code, as explained by The Cutting Room Floor wiki and highlighted by Supper Mario Broth on Bluesky, there's a file which contains, among other things, "data about what sound type to use for footsteps." Most of the descriptions here are things you'd expect, like "grass," "creaking floor," and "snow."
