Yeah. Nobody felt comfortable calling them RPGs. Because apart from character stats they were far removed from other contemporary RPGs.

Saw a YouTube video the other day about what genre we’d put Doom in if we didn’t call it FPS. And they also arrived at RPG because Doom was basically a continuation of first person dungeon crawler games. They just weren’t as deluded as OOP.

We could call most story driven games nowadays RPGs And that’s simply because that’s the root of many games. A lot of nerds wanted to bring their favourite TTRPG onto the computer and so invented a myriad new ways to do so which has been iterated on ever since.

Calling every game with RPG elements an RPG is like calling every mammal fish. Technically correct but massively oversimplified.