Best Year - 1987 beat 1985. I don't care about this contest enough to look up whether or not this result was weird.
It's basically Metroid beating SMB1.
Not even. We were specifically using North American release dates for any game that had been released in North America, so The Legend of Zelda was credited as a 1987 game.
I'll admit, I got that match wrong because SMB1 easily handled Z1 in 2009 until the other Mario games joined the poll (at which point Z1 very nearly upset SMB3 for second place behind SMW!), but there was a distinct pattern throughout that contest that years with a Zelda game almost invariably beat years without one. Add in that 1987 also had Metroid and it should've been obvious that as iconic as SMB1 was, it wasn't going to singlehandedly carry 1985 past many other years, not even a fellow NES year like '87.
Yep, 03 over 05 was my only wrong pick and cost me a perfect bracket :( ---