My Top 3:
1. Commodore 64
2. Commodore Amiga
3. Super Nintendo
Reasons:
1. The Commodore 64 is THE best selling, and most well-loved (hobby) computer from the '80s. While the manufacturer has since gone bankrupt and the rights to the company's products have been sold from one company to another (I think Tulip held most rights last I checked?), many Commodore users are still writing programs for it EVEN TODAY! This makes it the most long-lasting success from the entire computer industry. Many game concepts from todays games saw their origins in the Commodore 64 era. The space simulators found their origins in Elite, Escape from Castle Wolfenstein was a top-down 2D shoot'em'up before Wolfenstein 3D (its successor) decided to start us off on the 3D First-Person Shooter genre. Then there's the fact that Commodore as a company, and MOS as a chip manufacturer, couldn't have become as successful as they were in their haydays without the Commodore 64 to start them off. The Commodore 64's SID chip is still unsurpassed in terms of being able to compute audio data in realtime, even though Creative has made some headway into the area.
To summarize: The Commodore 64 is an ICON that brought with it not just games, but also a slew of amazing technology and (business) programs without which our current generation of home computers couldn't have existed.
2. Call me a Commodore-fangirl, but the Commodore Amiga continued where the Commodore 64/16/128 series left off. Great games, with some real mindblowing graphics for its day. I thoroughly enjoyed the Lotus racing game series, Sciv was great fun to play together with a friend, and Bar Games was a gimmick that should've had more of a fanbase. It was just great fun to have and play with. I personally own both systems listed in this; Commodore 64 & Commodore Amiga 500, and still enjoy playing with either. Just wish I had more space and more knowledge of how to preserve the original technology for the future. :/
A fun bit of trivia; For the longest time, the subtitles for many television broadcasting networks in the Western world were done with a Commodore Amiga, due to its ability to input these subtitles in realtime on a running video.
3. Talking about icons, the Super Nintendo really took the Nintendo Entertainment System to a new level. The games were amazing fun to play, but where the NES failed to deliver on the savegame section, the SNES brought gamers the option to save, go do something else, and then continue whenever they wanted to with the games they loved to play. I've fought many a round of Killer Instinct with my friends, and spent more time with that system than thinking about my homework. Much to the distress of my parents. ;)
Of all the Nintendo consoles, the SNES was the most succesful in my book.
As for why I didn't choose any of the others?
Sega took a wrong turn with their Saturn, and potential gamers took it out on them by dropping the Dreamcast before development was really complete. Sure, the Genesis was a great system, bringing Sonic and many other games into the world, and we must thank Sega for that. But they made some bad mistakes that are hard to ignore. The games on these systems WERE good, however, and their developers did what they could as the Sega brand sank into the quagmire they're in now. But having to work with their awkward controls might be a bit too much for the games to see new life as GOG games.
The Nintendo 64 failed, in my opinion. I know of few, very few, games that I liked on it. But the system didn't pull me to it as the NES or SNES did.
ANY arcade game is good. But only when it comes with the arcade system. Think about it this way; Terminator 2 was a fun arcade game because there was a large gun mounted in front of the screen and you could shoot the advancing hordes of T-800s with the gun in your hands. Playing it with, say, a mouse and keyboard, wouldn't be the same.
The Neogeo isn't a system I'm familiar with, and can't comment on.
Please do feel free to contact me about this reply. My email is makitk on the gmail network.