When did (PC) blockbuster/AAA gaming become an association anyway. I mean, I'm sure there were ones that always had bigger budgets vs. others but I used to go to the store, there were 10-30 titles on shelves, I'd ponder if any were good, randomly pick something. Store shelf wise, it's not like there was 70k+ pc games existing at that point. Like, Myst was originally published by the same who published Mavis Beacon Typing. >.> I wasn't enough of a game-geek back then I guess to be aware of "AAA" gaming, they were just ... there, like picking a can of soup. Although magazines made you aware of popular-game developers.
But yeah ... AAA today mostly means "attract as large an audience as possible for sales numbers", which for some reason is equated to mega development and marketing budgets. So they tend to become pretty generic, or just sequels of sequels. edit: and these days, remakes and reboots...