OK, after the absolute banger list that was 1986, this feels like a let down. A lot of second titles in the series. Of this list I played nethack a lot and had a lot of fun. But in regards to importance, it is just one roguelike, although maybe the most well-known. Maniac Mansion is also important, as the first LucasArts adventure and bringing a big step in adventure games. But it is neither the first adventure, nor the first graphical one. I am not well-versed in the world of beat-em-ups and shmups, so I cannot say much to Contra and Double Dragon. I heard of both, so they are probably important, if even I heard of them.

SMB2 and Punch Out were two of very first games I really played, renting them for a weekend.
Double Dragon I have on my Master System.
I played whole lot Nethack back in the day.
Maniac Mansion was the start of Lucas adventures, some of the definitely best games ever (one or other I'll surely vote in 90's).
And it's really hard to ignore Final Fantasy. Specifically the first game is one of very short list of RPGs that I've played twice.

But even so, I'm too voting other, except it's hard to say which that is. I'd like to also say Sid Meier's Pirates!, but I have to go for the best Master System game ever: Phantasy Star.
Phantasy Star was my first JRPG (or any RPG) and it still stands against lot more evolved games. What I particularly love about PS1 is how it fades being linear. It annoys me when RPGs are clearly linear, that you have to always find object or kill boss to move on to next area. It's not that PS1 doesn't actually work like same as most RPGs, but it's able to fool you to think it doesn't. You advance in so different and complicated ways that you don't realize it's effectively same as getting through a door to next valley or dungeon (even in the case where it literally is that). That's just good design/writing.

1987 I was getting my sex ed from Leisure Suit Larry


And learned about police procedures from Police Quest

We got stuck on that and were working through it together with the neighbors, swapping hints.
The driving sections were my favorite lol, so crude, but fun.

The end of the year had Space Quest 2 come out and we just upgraded to EGA. SQ2 was my favorite for a long time


Afterburner got a lot of playtime as well, magical game at the time. Yet mostly because I knew it from the Arcades with that mental motion 'cockpit'.

Test Drive came out that year, played that to death as well



It's hard to choose, in 1987 I was playing so many games at my friend's house on Amiga 500 which came out that year. What a machine.
We also still played a ton on the C64.

My personal goty was Space Quest 2 by far. I didn't get into Metal Gear and Final Fantasy until much later, but those 2 birthed another 2 giant franchises. I'll give the nod to Final Fantasy as we're on nr 16 already spanning multiple genres.

Zelda 2 was for a very long time my favolite Zelda until Breath of the Wild came along, so I had to give it to this game.

Nethack is a close second, a game that is getting improved to this day, while Maniac Mansion is basically where all modern Adventure games can trace their roots to.

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.

I never got into Police Quest and discovered Space Quest only years later. Larry also only came with the second installment to me.

Test drive made me crazy, I much rather played Stunts (aka 4D Sports Driving) than Test Drive at the time.

Stunts didn't come out until 1990 though. It was great, I made so many crazy tracks for that game.

I didn't discover Maniac Mansion until after I played Day of the Tentacle. The original still held up perfectly fine.

I played Stunts too a lot... I think. Maybe I mix the title with a different game. The game I remember at least had a track editor, and I built a lot of tracks with ice and dirt roads with it.

That's Stunts, you were correct

Probably a good contender for the 1990 GOTY thread

I got my 80286 (with a VGA GPU, 40MB HDD, 2MB memory, 5.25 and 3.5 inches floppy drives, Soundblaster soundcard and Joystickport, all from a PC they exchanged with the new 486 in the bank my dad worked. Still wonder what they were doing with that Joystick port in a bank, though...) in 1989, so Stunts was just around the corner. I got Test drive first, but it was testing my nerves and driving me crazy more than anything at the time.