I more meant with the whole "go on adventure" crap. My Fiancee plays a lot of Sims, and that has that sort of thing in now. The last Sims I played was the first one, and that just seemed to be build a house, have a family, customise it all. So that series has certainly changed a lot too ha.
The first person, art style etc, is more like PC Pup though that came out for Windows in the mid-late 90s. So Nintendogs was clearly also inspired by that.
I'm not saying the success of Nintendogs won't have heavily influenced design choices made with the game. But Nintendogs in turn had also borrowed a lot of the concepts it featured.