I went back to my personal top 50 and my top-rated game from the 80's is The Legend of Zelda (#25 overall), so it gets my vote. SMB3 is also on my list so I get why it will (probably) win.

I have to give it to Zelda as well. Not only was it ahead of its time at release, it's still ahead of its time with the freedom and physics system in TotK. Plus Zelda comes closest to playing a Studio Ghibli game, so I'm biased towards Zelda from recognizing Hayao Miyazaki's influence in its designs and art style.

Ofc SMB3 is gonna walk this, but as a story/rpg guy, my vote goes to Phantasy Star.

It's interesting how skewed the votes are towards the later years of the decade. It shows just much the 3rd generation levelled up gaming from the 2nd in regard to software quality that I don't know if we've ever seen again??

Yeah I was blown away by being able to go most anywhere and how you could skip rooms in dungeons.  It was just something never done before.  It is still a good game today 

It might actually be backwards for the 2010's lol. Skewed towards older games.

The only place you can see this again is looking through the PSVR(2) library from 2016 to now. It's a mess with all the different control schemes, movement schemes and comfort options. However VR still hasn't birthed a killer app. I guess it's too expensive nowadays to take the risk to make a huge game that only works in VR.

10 years is a long year in tech.  Both software for building games, and the chips in the cartridges massively improved over the time period.  The 90s started with SNES and ended with PS2 (well almost) for comparison.

Im going with Super Mario Bros. SMB3 is my favorite, but the first one is just too important not to vote for imo.

Voted SMB3 but only because its the right answer.

They say that history is written by the victors, and you can see it in this poll.  Nintendo was the big winner from this era.  I put up many successful Atari games through these 80's "Game of the Year" threads and not one of them even made it into a runner up position.  Sega is still around, and they did get one game, Phantasy Star, as a winner.  But clearly the big winner from the 80's is Nintendo and that has shown up in the polls.

Nintendo did win the history because of how people think of these games, not the other way around. While there are other great games than just the ones Nintendo made, there really wasn't much serious competition. Granted, Nintendo did benefit from the -83 market crash in the USA, as Nintendo was never as popular anywhere in the world than it was in the US. I believe it was the NDS that finally "won" Japan for Nintendo.