The 1980's game of the decade is Super Mario Bros 3.
The runner up is The Legend of Zelda.
The master thread for all of these contests can be found here.

It is time to vote for Game of the Decade.  A "Game of the Year" has been decided for each year of the 1980's by your votes!  Now, please comment on what you game voted for "Game of the Decade" and why.  These are the 10 candidates:

Pac-Man (1980, Arcade)
Donkey Kong (1981, Arcade)
Pitfall! (1982, Atari 2600)
Mario Bros. (1983, Arcade)
Duck Hunt (1984, NES/Arcade)
Super Mario Bros. (1985, NES)
The Legend of Zelda (1986, NES)
Phantasy Star (1987, SMS)
Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988, NES)
SimCity (1989, Home Computers)

If you want to access any of the early threads about the 80's, you can do so through the Master Thread.

The winner of this vote will be decided Thursday, Sept 28 at 11:59 EST.

FYI, I personally feel the 1980's were a little one sided.   There are 6 games in this poll that have the same original publisher.  All 6 of those games have a common game designer working on them.  And 4 of those 6 have the same protagonist.

Also, the SNES version of SimCity was the most popular version of the game, and it was published by that same publisher effectively giving them a 7th game from this decade.

From the ones I've played I enjoyed SimCity the most. I was born in 1986, so it wasn't until the 90s that I was old enough to really play games and get my first console. Hopefully you do the 90s as well; I'll have played a lot more of those games.

Pac-Man for me. As much as I love some of the games from the 80s, some personally even more than Pac-Man, I find it to be one of those rare games that are actually 10/10.

Super Mario Bros 3.
It has it all; tight controls, clever level design, packed with secrets, abundant creativity, a huge amount of content, the list goes on.
More than three decades later it remains a gem.

Voted for Sim City, but I expect SMB3 to win the crown

Heh, so far the comments are spread fairly evenly among several games.  But then you look at the poll and SMB3 already has a big lead.  I think a lot of forum users are just voting SMB3 and then waiting for the 90's to show up.

The more interesting race may be to see which game takes runner up.

Nintendo are the only company still around from those days, so possibly not surprising.  The other big companies were Atari, Sega and Commodore but none of those are around in the same way any more.

To be fair, SMB3 and Zelda1 are both great games.  "Game of the decade" is going to be a controversial choice no matter what wins...

Zelda because it was so unbelievably ahead of its time. It was open world back when most games were basic arcade with little level design.

I'm giving my absolutely subjective vote to Phantasy Star.

My problem with choosing game of year/decade is whether to name the most iconic or influential game (in this case SMB), what I consider actually best of these games or one I have most personal nostalgia. From this list Phantasy Star is for me the latter two.