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You have before you three series. The first, Series A, was the first known use of a trope, but it may or may not have been intentional. The second, Series B, was the first well known, intentional, use of the trope. The third, Series C, does not claim originality, and in fact ripped off series B, but is the template that all later uses of this trope follow.
Series A is the Ur Example.
Series B is the Trope Maker.
Series C is the Trope Codifier.
The Trope Maker is frequently also the Trope Codifier, but not always. In particular, when the Trope Maker is a work of outstanding quality, the Trope Codifier will be the story that shows how lesser authors can do a good imitation. Conversely, a great writer may gather up many old tropes and polish them to a shine, codifying them for later generations.
The Trope Codifier may be the first theme park version or Pragmatic Adaptation. If the trope is Older Than They Think, the Codifier is usually mistaken for the Trope Maker. Really old tropes may have been codified every couple of centuries for millennia, as successive codifiers show how to adapt the age-old trope to their times.
Examples should be of Trope Codifiers that aren't Trope Makers themselves.
Related to Older Than They Think. If a Trope Codifier is particularly influential, and the Trope Maker a little twisted you may have an Unbuilt Trope.
Also see Most Triumphant Example.
Examples
Anime and Manga
Comic Books
Films
- Halloween was the Trope Maker for the Slasher genre, but Friday The Thirteenth was the Trope Codifier. In particular, Friday was the actual Trope Maker for Death By Sex rather than Death By Not Paying Attention (Including Having Sex) for all the imitators that followed.
- Star Wars is the Trope Codifier for Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (as well as a heck of a lot of other ideas). Campbell described the pattern based on a range of heroic myths, but today, any good story that follows the Hero's Journey pattern is accused of ripping off Star Wars — and any bad story that follows the Hero's Journey pattern actually does.
- The 1931 movie version of Dracula codified most modern Vampire Tropes.
- And in the same way, the 1940 film The Wolf Man codified the tropes for werewolves.
- Okay, created most of them out of whole cloth.
- Birth Of A Nation pulled together all of the little camera tricks and editing techniques that were tried in the early years of film into a coherent set of storytelling tools. It was also horrendously racist. The gymnastics film history classes have to go through because of this are quite amusing.
- This Is Spinal Tap: The Codifier for the filmed Mockumentary genre.
- Evil Dead 2 is probably the Trope Codifier for Chainsaw Good, especially once the protagonist replaces his hand with one.
Literature
- The Standard Fantasy Setting's Trope Maker was The Lord Of The Rings; the Trope Codifier was Dungeons And Dragons.
- Except for Vancian Magic, which was made by Dying Earth and codified by D&D.
- D&D can also be seen as the Trope Maker of Fantastic Miniatures War Games (Chainmail was the Ur Example of a Mini's games featuring fantastic elements, and D&D was originally just the "small warbands" variant of it), but Warhammer and Warhammer40000 are the Trope Codifiers.
- Another Trope Codifier was Terry Books's novel The Sword of Shannara, which showed that Doorstopper fantasy novels that weren't written by Tolkien could also go on to sell zillions of copies.
- Sherlock Holmes is the Trope Codifier for many detective tropes; Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin stories were the Trope Maker, including such tropes as the less astute Watson figure as narrator and the far-reaching deductions based on attention to seemingly trivial details.
- Medea is the Trope Codifier for the Woman Scorned, although Ishtar from The Epic Of Gilgamesh is the oldest known example. The problem with being the first heroic epic ever is that you're the Trope Maker for every trope you use but the Trope Codifier for nothing.
- Raymond Chandler is considered the Trope Codifier of hard-boiled crime fiction, following Carroll John Daly (who The Other Wiki considers to be the Ur Example) and Dashiell Hammett (the Trope Maker).
- An alternate way of thinking has Hammett as the Ur Example, Chandler as the Trope Maker and Mickey Spillane (author of the Mike Hammer novels) as the Trope Codifier. It's probably just as valid; Chandler appropriated as many tropes from Hammett as Spillane did from Chandler.
- The earliest use of Ancient Astronauts is Edison's Conquest of Mars from 1898, but the first popular story to use the concept was At the Mountains of Madness from 1931.
- The Red Badge of Courage did this for War Is Hell. For some reason, it's particularly likely to be mistakenly identified as the Trope Maker.
- While Dracula was the first modern codifier for vampiric tropes, The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice was a subversion that served to codify the current template used by everyone from White Wolf to Twilight and Underworld. Both kinds of vampire are in active use, of course.
- Contrary to what some fans believe, Harry Potter didn't originate the Wizarding School trope — but it is such a prominent codifying example that everything that comes after it will have to either Follow The Leader or strenuously differentiate itself from Hogwarts.
- Snow Crash is widely recognized as the codifier for The Metaverse and the Digital Avatar but William Gibson did them first.
Live Action TV
- In Reverse Whodunnits, the Trope Codifier is Columbo, Trope Maker being R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke.
- Despite the name, Dawson Casting was neither made nor codified by Dawsons Creek; Beverly Hills 90210 does the codifying honors there. Possible Trope Makers include Bye Bye Birdie, in which 21-year-old Ann-Margaret played the 16-year-old-lead, and the many 1960s beach movies in which Annette Funicello, in her late thirties by the time the last ones were made, played ostensibly fresh-faced debutantes.
- Star Trek did not invent modern science-fiction television; but it made many science-fiction tropes commonplace on television, so much so that it is its own franchise and has influenced almost every subsequent speculative fiction series since, up to and including Heroes.
- Mork from Mork And Mindy is the most prominent example of an Amusing Alien.
Music
- By the time of Michael Jackson, music videos were evolving beyond just shots of the band, but he set the standard for everything that came after him.
Theatre
Video Games
- Doom wasn't the first First Person Shooter, but it is the game that all others will be called clones of simply for being First Person Shooters.
- Considering how old Doom is, now you're just as likely, perhaps even more than likely, to see whatever FPS title being called a "ripoff of Halo".
- Super Mario Brothers was the Codifier for Platform Games (see The Other Wiki's article on platform games
 ).
- Ever Quest is the Trope Codifier for just about every single MMO trope of today. While it wasn't the first of its kind (MUDs and Ultima Online get that title), it was the first to establish the model that other MMOs would follow, up to and including World Of Warcraft.
- Arguably, Ever Quest was the MMO codifier v.1.0, with World of Warcraft setting the target higher, v.2.0 if you will.
- When it comes to Match Three Games: Columns is the Trope Maker, Bejeweled is the codifier.
- Pong is usually considered the first Video Game by the general public. The actual first Video Game is a bit debatable depending on how you define Video Game, ranging from an unnamed cathode-ray based game in 1947 to the 1972-released Magnavox Odyssey game console (the strongest contender turning out to lie smack in the middle, 1962's SpaceWar!), but the consensus is that Pong is the Trope Codifier rather than the true Trope Maker.
- The RTS is anybody's guess. The best this troper can come up with is Stonkers as the Ur Example, Dune II as the Trope Maker, and WarCraft II as the Trope Codifier. (WCII was the first one to formalise the RPG aspects, including clearly visible hit point counters and Hero Units.)
- I always thought it was Sun Tzu's Art Of War, Dune II and Command And Conquer.
- For the record, C&C didn't push things forward that far - not for nothing was it described at the time as Dune III (although this troper does view it as the game that killed the floppy disk). As for The Ancient Art Of War... Stonkers came first, which means this is a regional dispute.
- For once, it definitely is Stonkers — 1983 IIRC.
- Although it definitely was not the first, the first Devil May Cry is widely seen as the key inspiration for similar "Stylish Action" games like God Of War.
- Street Fighter II for Fighting Games.
- Capcom Vs Whatever games for the concept of "tag battle" fighters (discounting wresting games, which have wildly different gameplay.)
- Broadly speaking, nothing in any Blizzard game is new or original. They just introduce and tweak the successful elements of previous games to make ones that are quite good.
Tabletop Games
- It's unclear whether or not Dungeons And Dragons was the first to present an alignment system beyond good/neutral/evil, but it was definitely the most prominent, and its nine-point alignment system comprises all of the Character Alignment tropes today. Ironically, the most recent version of the game has done away with the alignment system, for the most part.
- The Zerg of Starcraft may have been the namers for Zerg Rush, but the Tyranids of Warhammer 40000, whom the Zerg were heavily inspired by/based on, were infamous for the tactic long before the Swarm came around, thus presenting an odd case where the Namer came after the Codifier.
- Of course, both are based on the Bugs from Starship Troopers, which is strange because the Bugs were not mindless, rush-y drones like either the Zerg or the Tyranids.
- The bugs of the Movies as well as the Starship troopers are actually stolen from the Tyranids and cadian shock troopers respectively. Therefore making Warhammer the Ur example in this case being overshadowed and seen as a rip off.
- Starship Troopers was released in 1959, far before even Warhammer Fantasy came out, let alone 40K or the Tyranids.
- Yes, but the movie is what they were referring to.
- GURPS quite literally defined the Weirdness Magnet trope.
Other
- An earlier work by William Gibson coined the term "Cyberspace". Both Neuromancer and Tron set the standards for what we think of it.
- Acorn Computers' Arthur OS had the Ur-Example. NEXTSTEP had the original and the user-interface trope namer. But if you've got a dock in your operating system, the OS you're inevitably accused of copying is Apple's Mac OSX. So of course it's also Older Than They Think.
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