As popular as it is, minecraft isn't there yet. Pong and pacman aren't major forces anymore. Tetris I'm not sure about.

Smb was huge, everybody knows it, everybody's played it, people still like mario 30 years later. It's hard to argue against that 

No, it really isn't. The cultural impact of Space Invaders and Pac-man were greater and more important for video-games. They raised awareness of video-games from nearly nothing up to pop-culture levels. Pac-man is especially important because it was the first cross-media success for video-games. Space invaders, even more than Pac-man, is celebrated for it's sheer immersion into society, as cabinets were everywhere, and is estimated to have grossed $14 billion dollars when adjusted for inflation, which sits comfortably at the top of all video-game earnings. Super Mario Bros., if you're wondering, is at $3.5 billion, while Pac-man is in second place at nearly $13 billion. Just think about that for a second.

Yeah, I know this is a Nintendo forum so I know how this is going to end up, but Space Invaders and Pac-man took video-games from irrelevancy to significant cultural mind-share. It's hard to get more important than that.

As for that video, my god ... some of those points are hilarious. Even if I disagree, I expected a far better job from someone taking the time to make a video. It's almost like satire.

"The verb of jumping just became the verb that you used in video-games. Every platformer after that, that's what you do, you jump. Nathan Drake jumps." Holy cats. Because games like Pit-fall did not exist. What the literal fuck.

They even praised it for having a narrative.

You're arguing a point that's irrelevant to SMB's importance because when SMB launched gaming was dead for a second time this is why Pacman and SI aren't held as high up as SMB because the era the latter created is still running today, Pacman and Space Invaders were great games for their times but only inspired clones of themselves instead of inspiring new approaches. They're legendary games yes but the are aspects both technical and commercial that SMB did that only Pong can match, SMB inspired multiple genres, development approaches, games and so on that has built modern gaming to what it is today and the era is still going today, the hasn't been a crash since SMB. People like Carmack have come out and said how it inspired them to take a new approach, the fact that SMB can inspire Metroid, Zelda and Wolfenstein to name a few which themselves became templates for entire genres highlights importance.

Revenue doesn't indicate importance to the industry, Pacman and SI are iconic but what else did they inspire in the same regard and that's what it comes down to when looking at influence on the industry.

Gaming was not dead.  I have no idea what you're talking about there.  Arcades did not die and, quite honestly, the popularity of arcades in Japan is why the home console industry rose again and would have done so even without Nintendo.

Also, if you're saying that nothing that came later in the industry was inspired by Space Invaders or Pac-man ... well, there really isn't anything else to say to that, because that's ridiculous.

Yeah, who would have thought in 1985 you could have such great narrative in video games?

Colossal Cave, Dragon's Lair, Mystery House, The Wizard and the Princess, The Hobbit, The Oregon Trail, Ultima, Wizardry and all the Infocom games (Zork, Suspended, Starcross, Deadline, Infidel, The Witness, Sorcerer, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall...) got it all wrong the years before. ;)

Gaming was dead the crash happened and 90% of developers went under, arcades were seen as a fad that wouldn't last in the long run especially with developers going under. Japan never experienced the crash because gaming was new over there as opposed to the west where it had been around for over a decade, the NES launched in 1983 in Japan after the huge success of Donkey Kong in arcades which launched around the same period as Pacman (1980) so even then what you're trying to argue still ignores many aspects.

1983 was when the crash took hold but Japan had the NES launch that same year which is the first modern console and averted the problem, in the west for the two years leading up to the NES' launch gaming evaporated and consumer interest was at negative.

I'm not even going to bother reading it, because "greatest" is so subjective that there is nothing other than clicks that can be gained from such a claim.

Now there is probably a very good argument for most important though, and it's a better topic for discussion. Because the most important something is the thing that takes you in a new and exciting direction, or breaks it open to a whole new level of popularity. Like the original iphone is the most important touchscreen phone ever to be made, but it's not the greatest touchscreen phone. Iron Man can be said to be the most important marvel comics movie ever, but it's not necessarily the greatest.

I don't agree any recent games (as in the last 15 years) can be regarded as most important. They're all standing on the shoulders of what went before. And as the waggle craze is over there's no Wii game that can be said to be most important in terms of fundamentally changing the industry and forever taking the mainstream of gaming in a new direction.

Of course it is

I totally agree, gaming wasn't dead back then. That "video game crash" only affected the north american home console industry. Europe wasn't much affected, the arcades and the home computer market prospered. Sierra Online (Ken + Roberta Williams), Activision (David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead), Electronic Arts (Trip Hawkins)  and Origin Systems (Robert + Richard Garriot) grew from small companies to multimillion-dollar-companies in these years.

The Japanese consoles and games were a welcome addition, but they weren't the saviors of video gaming.

I think we can all agree that Super Mario Bros. was and is great and important.

Greatest and the most important might be a stretch though.