Phantasy Star IV is soooo good. Hope you'll join me in voting for that! Phantasy Star I managed to get the win in '87 so there's hope for IV!

Couldn't agree with what you're saying any more. Shame there's very little love for Sega these days. I think people are very likely to vote for older entries in franchises they're stil interested in (ie Mario, Zelda, FF, etc), so even though Nintendo and Sega were neck and neck in the 4th gen on the console front, these retrospective polls don't show that.

Hopefully we do get more balance from the big PS games, but the PS userbase has always been more fragmented than Nintendo's where people tend to play the same few 1st party games

Another really tough year.

Dune 2 started RTS, Wolfenstein 3D started FPS. And I have great personal nostalgia for both.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is arguably best Lucas adventure on gameplay, if not as funny or atmospheric as some others.
Shining Force is one of my top 20 series.
Defenders of Oasis is a wonderful little Game Gear RPG.
King's Quest VI is perhaps my favorite of the series.

I'm voting Ultima Underworld. I only played it couple years ago and was pleasantly surprised. I'm not a big fan of westerns RPGs, Baldur's Gate or KotOR won't get my vote. But I really enjoyed UU, it was so much ahead of its time and remains a highly playable and entertaining game even by modern standards.

The Genesis was extremely popular in the USA for like 3 or 4 years.  It went from I've never heard of the company to all of a sudden a few friends had one and there were a bunch of anti Nintendo commercials at the time.  If you owned a Sega Genesis in the 90's you probably vote Sonic 2, if you owned a SNES you are probably voting Mario Kart, if you were a pc gamer, you are probably voting for Wolfenstein.  There were some 30+ millions Genesis owners, I wonder why we don't have more of them here.  That one Segahearts dude would probably be all over these polls for the sega games if he was still here.

No doubt the SNES had the best library, these have been the hardest polls IMO. Imma say Mario Kart,

Yeah, unless you count Wolfeinstein 3D which launched FPS, Dune II that launched RTS and Ultima Underworld that launched Immersive Sims, nothing really genre changing...:P

For consoles, the biggest game by far was Sonic 2. It utterly dominated the industry. For arcades, the same was true for Mortal Kombat. Can't speak for PC, since I wasn't a PC gamer.

Many early PC games had cross ports with Amiga 500, NES and SNES. Sim City managed to win the 1989 poll, yet likely because it had Mario and Bowser appear in the 1991 SNES version...

The game of the decade polls are a bit one sided, Mario vs Zelda, although FF7 can take it with the votes split between all the Mario and Zelda titles lol.
Game of the 90s is Half-Life for me, it changed the FPS genre, set the bar for many years to come, AI that still feels fresh today, great campaign chock full of movie references, in game cut scenes that don't lock the player down, and HL led to launch of Steam with HL2. We'll see if it stands a chance :)
(Nope OOT came out that year as well lol)

Anyway these threads are an awesome trip down memory lane :) It's hard to believe how many great games came out year after year. I keep thinking this or that came out much later. And also a decade where humor still played a prominent part in games thanks to all the amazing point and click adventures. Today's games feel so dry and grindy in comparison. Humor doesn't really work for 100+ hour games...

Sonic 2 did dominate the industry and was a very important game, it didn't outsell Mario Kart.  Sonic 2 sold 6 million, Mario Kart 8.76 million, Mortal Kombat sold 3 million across all platforms.  Now going into the arcade and just watching people playing Mortal Kombat games and pulling off fatalities was quite the experience back in the day.  Actually playing it not so much, since you would get a match or two against the computer, and than someone would sneak up behind you put in a quarter and beat you near flawlessly to take your spot.

Meh, being the first isnt always what makes a genre popular or impact it much. I might vote for Doom for the next year though even if Im not a big fan of the first one. That was a genre defining game.