Pac-Man was definitely the most important game of 1980 from a cultural impact standpoint and certainly gets my vote on this list of options. It was among the first games I owned because my dad made sure to get the NES version early on, which he got for us to play together. Those other games were retro entries at the arcade by the time I discovered them in the '90s. (In another note though, Centipede had been mom's favorite video game. She bought the Game Boy version for me, to that end, when that came out. Or at least it was her favorite game until she eventually discovered Tetris around the turn of the century anyway.)
I'll admit that personally I'm biased these days in favor of the computer classics from the era over the arcade classics of the time though, if only because the former were a bit more narratively sophisticated, and Mystery House is probably my personal favorite computer game originally released in 1980 for the simple reason cited by Conina. (Zork I here I think of as a port of '70s-era content, not so much as actual 1980 material.)
Last edited by Jaicee - on 05 September 2023
