For me it was probably Starseige:Tribes (1998) scripting. The typical application involved saving and applying predefined inventory/loadouts, so that your chara

For me it was probably Starseige:Tribes (1998) scripting. The typical application involved saving and applying predefined inventory/loadouts, so that your character could simply walk up to an in-game kiosk and become fully kitted out in an instant. It went beyond that though, since you could also react to chat messages, start timers, put up custom HUD elements... There was other stuff before then, like hex-editing saved game files, or writing HTML for a homepage, but neither were really "real" programming.