An Infocom text adventure. Way to impress me with an obscure game.

There are a couple ways of evaluating what I think is the best game of the 1980s:

1) Which title was the most important?

2) Which title is my personal favorite?

The answer to the first question, as far as I'm concerned, is clearly the original Super Mario Bros. because, frankly, without it video gaming might well have died off and been forgotten here in the U.S. In the mid-80s, gaming as a medium was on the ropes commercially in the United States. People mainly played video games in arcades back then, but the (first) heyday thereof was coming to a close, and home gaming systems were in a full-blown tailspin to such an extent that Nintendo had to market what in Japan was known as the Family Computer as instead a multipurpose "entertainment system" that happened to play video games in order to get retailers to stock it. People referred to video gaming in the past tense, as a passing fad of the early '80s. The NES was released experimentally at first in targeted markets only for a limited time window. Only because the original Super Mario Bros. released during this time window and took off was the NES, and with it home video gaming as a medium, saved in the United States. It's tough to top that development for objective importance, in my opinion!

My answer to the second question is very different. A Mind Forever Voyaging is my personal favorite from that decade. It was an interactive fiction novel created to critique the overwhelmingly popular public policies of the Reagan Administration in an era-appropriate cyberpunkish type of way. You play as a sentient computer in the year 2031 and simulate the projected future, at various junctures, of a proposed Plan for Renewed National Purpose in a declining United States of North America whose tenets combine neoconservative Reaganism with populistic economic nationalism of a form we would easily recognize today. The projected future the plan yields after 20 years is bright. But 30, 40, and 50 years down the road, not so much, to put it mildly. 

A Mind Forever Voyaging was intended to be controversial, designer Steve Meretzky said at the time, but wound up a commercial flop that caused little uproar, resulting in Meretzky going on to create Leather Goddesses of Phobos next because he figured that a game with "a little bit of sex" would be more effective at stirring up controversy. (So yeah, creators like him didn't exactly follow the emerging play-it-safe philosophy popularized by Nintendo in and around this time.) It's not the most interactive game of the '80s either, endeavoring to include only a single puzzle toward the end. But it is different from, and IMO more effective than, simply reading a book. Next Generation magazine I think aptly summarized it in a 1996 retrospective as "one of the few games...to attempt something more deep in the interactive entertainment medium than killing or humor. It presents a grim view of a dark future not by telling you about it, but rather by letting you experience it and do things for yourself." Therein lies its merit, to me. A Mind Forever Voyaging was an early example of game developers seeking to establish gaming as not simply a vehicle for entertainment, but as a kind of art form as well; an objective that's still somewhat contentious even today, but was even more daring at the time. I admire that audacity and, contrary to what some of the more critical reviews of the time suggested, have wound up revisiting AMFV many times over the years. Unlike with many other '80s era games, this one retains its luster for my taste. It has aged very well. Much better than many of its more interactive, but also emptier, peers that have been long since surpassed in design, and therefore in entertainment value.