Venture

Venture took AdVenture up a notch.  The colecovision had screaming hardware, hardware that seemed indistinguishable from arcade hardware to my young eyes, and Venture was a great port on the system.  I believe I heard about Venture from the same sortie that first brought back word of Dig Dug.  Venture included elements of Adventure, multiple enemies of an early Roguelike, and Berzerk and was an absolute blast to play and a blast to talk about. LOVED IT.

Satan's Hollow

I remember thinking that this game was equal parts awesome and insane.  Didn't they know that we were already taking heat on the D&D front about the devil?  I didn't need to hear about how a Galaxians variant shooter with an awesome joystick controller was going to turn me into the prince of darkness too.  Sweet cabinet art on this one but help a guy out there Bally Midway, my copy of the Fiend Folio was already causing trouble.

Gauntlet

I heard about the existence of Gauntlet before I got to play it.  The time period between these two events seemed extremely long. Nerd needs to play game....badly. Nerd is about to die.  Gauntlet was awesome for its class based dungeon crawling design.  It had amazing use of voice, but the constantly draining health was a pretty lame and inelegant quarter grabber.  The multi-player, party based component is what really took this one over the top.  There is controversy about the origins of the design that lead to gauntlet.  I went to the web to try to confirm the story I heard out of wotc that Richard Garfield had designed gauntlet, but the controversy I found there did not include him....the mystery remains.  Gauntlet is a certifiable classic.