Pac-Man.

Man, if I had existed back at this year, I probably would never got into gaming lol.

(Or at least wouldnt have gotten into gaming until the late 1980s or early 1990s like I originally did).

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.)

I have an interest in video game history, but I stick to what stands out. Im not trying to memorize the entire history of video games. Roberta Williams I have heard of and games like Kings Quest and a few other Sierra games. Never heard of Mystery House. That might be because the title is very generic. I just think its ridiculous to put that above Pac-Man. A game even 90 year old non gamers know about.

Pac-Man because of it's innovation. ^^

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clearly Pac-Man.

I wasn't playing games in 1980, but when I started in 1982, I thought the Missile Command was a lot better than Pac-Man. Even still, as a little kid, I recognized that Pac-Man was a much bigger deal.

Only one answer here: Pac-Man.
It's the most iconic videogame/character in game history, along a few others.

Hard to argue against Pac-Man here, it is still great to this day. Missile Command and Centipede also hold up nicely.

I perhaps most enjoy Missile Command and Pac-Man is most iconic, but I vote Rogue for its lasting effect on game design.

I’ll second that.

And I agree, it’s considered one of the most influential games of all time even by the mid 1980s, when I first played it. And I know people in this forum aren’t alone, as gaming magazines in the 80s and 90s would talk about this one when discussing notable games from the past. Granted, PacMan was substantially more popular because Arcades and was basically the icon of video games even until sometime after Mario’s success (which probably took over by SMB3). The Arcade sector several times bigger in the 80s than all other platforms combined and still outgrossing the console (home + handheld) sector until 1997 when PlayStation and Pokémon exploded (with the exception of 92 and 93 at the commercial height of the 16-bit era and early handheld era).

I was also thinking Wizardry, which I thought was 1980, but it was only the beta release and not the final (which came out in 1981). Also, I know the version of the Wizardry games I played and enjoyed were Japanese remakes with an updated battle system based on Dragon Quest’s menu selection rather than the more convoluted typed commands. Also, much like early PC Adventure and RPGs, Wizardry required external literature to be able to play it correctly.

Rogue was also a very interesting game, but again, I only played derivatives on later hardware. It is also one of the most influential games in the indie gaming world.

I ended up writing my own Pac-Man on MSX with a twist that pills are ammo which you can fire at ghosts, instead of them running away. It was one of my first coding projects and I hadn't got into multi tasking yet, so everything paused while the bullet was flying until it either hit a ghost or wall. Drawing out all the animations on graph paper, to then convert to hexadecimal sprites was a lot of work.

Yet I'll vote for rogue as I played that a lot on 8086 PC. r.exe, just one letter, hours of fun. I never got very far as I didn't know English yet so had no clue what anything did except by experimenting. Capital letters were always bad!