Hmmm...this one is tough! I can't decide! There's no super clear winner here in terms of cultural impact, I don't think, which leaves me to just vote for my favorite. Trouble there is that there are four 1987 games that I kinda like about equally well: Maniac Mansion, Dungeon Master, Metal Gear, and The Great Giana Sisters. Those of you here on this thread I suspect are at least familiar with the first three, but people outside of Europe may not recall The Great Giana Sisters, so brief explainer on that:
The Great Giana Sisters was more or less a clone of the original Super Mario Bros. set in dream world instead of the Mushroom Kingdom and starring Italian sisters instead of Italian brothers. It's the only linear platformer of the era I'm aware of that used a female protagonist exclusively. It was apparently originally made as a Commodore 64 port of Super Mario Bros. itself, but Nintendo refused the devs a license, so they reworked it as a new game. The NES never really caught on Europe like it did elsewhere. Computer gaming was bigger in terms of at-home gaming in 1980s Europe and the Commodore 64 was the biggest computer gaming platform at the time, so the purpose of the West German developers had been to get Super Mario Bros. onto a platform that people there owned. Since Nintendo refused them a license, The Great Giana Sisters wound up functioning as essentially Europe's Super Mario Bros. culturally. Or at least it did for the year or so that it was on the market anyway. Nintendo threatened them with a copyright lawsuit on the grounds that certain elements were too similar and it got pulled from store shelves as a result at some point in the second half of 1988. Fans kept the memory alive though through the decades though with a number of unofficial ports and mods and eventually an official remake was released for the Nintendo DS in 2009 and a crowd-funded sequel -- my favorite linear platformer of all time, Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams -- came out on consoles in 2012.
Some of my favorite elements of The Great Giana Sisters I came to really like over the years were its soundtrack (perhaps the best on the Commodore 64, frankly), its steeper difficulty level, its layered power-ups, and general, dreamlike, whimsical atmosphere. The controls are more slippery than in Super Mario Bros. though and I've never liked that about it. Overall, though its decidedly less original, I prefer this game to Super Mario Bros. Here's a playthrough of the original Commodore 64 version:
So now you know if you didn't before. I might also add that Super Mario Bros. 2 actually ranks among my favorite entries in the Super Mario franchise...though honestly I kinda prefer the original version, Doki Doki Panic. Those are runner-up picks here for me.
