I'm stealing this.

That's kinda hard for me, I had to Google games that came out in 1980.

So:

Pac-Man (Nice!)
Defender (What?)
Rally-X (Who?)
Tank Battalion (Huh?)
The Prisoner (I give up...)

A pretty decent year actually, contrary to movies, my year of birth 1988. At least if you lived in Japan, here in Europe everything was always years late back then. New games in Japan were games like;

- Altered Beast (Arcade and MegaDrive in JP)
- Final Fantasy II
- Ninja Gaiden

The two biggest and most well known games, which also happened to be awesome, however are without a doubt;

- Mega Man 2
- Super Mario Bros. 3

In hindsight though, the most important game maybe wasn't even the Mario platformer, but the forerunner of Mario Kart;

- Famicom Grand Prix

Here in Europe, the belated games we got in 1988 were among others were games like;

- Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
- Metal Gear
- Castlevania
- Metroid

A pretty good year actually .

Defender was actually well-regarded and very popular. It's faded into obscurity mostly because the IP owner, Midway, went bankrupt. I believe Time Warner bought it when they bought Midway's arcade assets, but Time Warner doesn't seem interested in any of Midway's arcade assets other than Mortal Kombat.

Seems like 2000 had a better year for games than movies.
The Sims- Windows
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask-N64
Perfect Dark-N64
Diablo II-Windows
Spyro: Year of the Dragon-PS1

Defender is that side-scrolling space shooter on Atari and arcade where you shoot UFOs that try to pick up people off the ground. Fairly well known game and a pretty fun one at that actually .

Don't know the other three though, I'd guess (without looking it up) that 'Tank Battalion' is some kind of Combat clone or something .

The level design is very Pac-Man-ish.

Lol yeah, looked it up. It's Combat in a Pac Man maze. And it's by Namco even .

1994:

Super Metroid
Donkey Kong Country
Final Fantasy VI
Killer Instinct
Sonicand Knucles

1986 not a bad year.

The Legend of Zelda
Dragon Quest
Castlevania
Metroid
Bubble Bobble