I could be wrong, but I have a feeling it originated from the business and investment world...and the reason we've seen the term used so much in the gaming industry in recent years is due to the industry becoming more corporate focused and market driven.
The mentality of gamers has also become more corporate and market driven. I mean, a decade ago I don't remember gamers being so obsessed with sales, all that mattered was good games...but these days, with how gamers post monthly sales data, you'd think they had their entire stock portfolio invested in a company. Not to mention, the whole point of System Wars and the idea of a "fanboy" is blind loyalty to one company's brand name, regardless of the quality they or their competitors put out.
Bonds get credit ratings like AAA, BBB, CCC...with AAA being the best investment. As for games, outside of forums, I first heard it used in the professional sense from financial analysts (guys like Pachter) to describe a big budget title that looked to be a good financial investment for a company and it's investors and could raise a company's stock, probably due to it being used to describe a game that has a high market awareness giving it a higher probability to be highly financially successful.
Especially since I've seen it applied to games that didn't neccessarily get the highest reviews, but were titles that had very high budget and marketing that were financial hits...games like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy XIII and Saint's Row have been described as being "AAA", even though that didn't necessarily get very high review aggregate. In reverse, I've never really seen the term "AAA" applied to indie titles, despite some getting very high aggregate review scores, even above big budget titles that have been labeled as "AAA".
I don't really put much weight behind those terms....especially since most of the terms popping up on gaming forums these days don't seem to make any real sense and are all over the map in terms of their definition (ie "console exclusive" or "AAA") and don't really seem to have a universally concrete one. Take the term "console exclusive", you'd think it would mean a game that's only available to console platforms, but it's been used to describe a game that is on one company's console platform and not it's competitors, despite the same game being easily available on platforms outside of console, which get ignored some some reason.
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