Oh yes, also:

Earthbound
Golden Sun (both GBA entries)
Terranigma
Secret of Mana
The original Spyro trilogy

and if we allow games that were never officially translated to english:

Mother 3
Seiken Densetsu 3

@Felthry you covered most of the franchises I would have mentioned. I might thrown in Legend of the Dragoon or a Harvest Moon title.

@pexl Legend of the Dragoon is still one we really ought to play sometime

Isn't it the one that has some compatibility problems with ps2s, though? I'd hate to play through most of it and then have it crash

@Felthry Oh, and Kirby Dreamland.

@pexl oh dear, how did I forget kirby!

@packbat I'd love to see detailed commentary on your choices! We've never even heard of some of those. Why not emulating F-zero?

@Felthry Starting with F-Zero: I haven't played in emulator for a while, so things may have changed ... but F-Zero on the original SNES is /utterly smooth/ in gameplay. The seamless gamefeel does a great deal to sell the velocity of the vehicles and create a rare experience, and an emulation that doesn't achieve will fail to communicate an essential part of what makes the game important.

I'm going to be busy for a bit but go ahead and let me know any others you want me to talk about - or I can just go down the whole rest of the list if you want.

@packbat We've never attempted to play it on an emulator. I think SNES emulation is in a pretty damn good state right now though; the days of zsnes and snes9x are over

@Felthry Makes sense - and I think I was probably playing it on snes9x. If a modern emulator can match the gameplay experience, then that would work just as well or better (being easier to get a hold of).

@Felthry (All of these have Wikipedia pages apparently? Useful.)

- M.U.L.E.: economics game. Has some pretty sweet game dynamics for markets. Particularly of interest for me because of the implicit condemnation of predatory business practices; as a kid, I would always monopolize food and create artificial scarcity to pull as much money as possible from my competitors, and then at the end it would always say the colony as a whole was super poor.

- Depression Quest: Incorporates the minimum possible element of player interaction, a choice with a fixed set of options, to highlight how depression /eliminates/ choices. The option is there, but you can't do it. That's not commonly used for narrative purpose in game design and it does it well. Also, choice-based text adventures are a thing and examples of it are good to include. (In the draft where this was a curriculum, the horror game "my father's long, long legs" - https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=u6urdbmp6pdv6lk1 - came first, because it's an excellent game and a more typical, if virtuosic, example of the Twine medium.)

- Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec: one of the best Gran Turismo games from the period when they still included the license test mechanic. I think those license tests were good pedagogical tools in and of themselves in the skills of analog controller-based sim-style videogame driving.

- Gone Home: Environmental storytelling, self-paced exploration, and multiple narratives, many of which take place in the player's mind as they determine what happened. Probably the most iconic first-person exploration game, and if not, I still think it's a more intellectually accessible choice than "Dear Esther".

- Left 4 Dead: This is the game that taught me how to play first-person shooters. As someone who was incompetent at first-person shooters, I was still an asset at normal difficulty because I was someone who could press the "get a downed person back up" or "get a special infected off" button for one of my allies. It's a cool game, it's a cool co-op shooter game, there's a lot to talk about with the AI Director and so forth, and it would also be a co-op game that a class containing players of very different skill levels could still participate in.

- Portal: ...it's a good first-person puzzle game? I haven't put a lot of thought into this choice.

- Mega Man 2: It's my favorite 2D action platformer game. Again, not a lot of thought put into this one.

- Myst: Early point-and-click adventure game. Explore beautiful fantastical worlds, solve weird puzzles, find all kinds of interesting worldbuilding information. I think a lot of puzzle games owe inspiration to this, and I think it's still a neat game.

@packbat What is the license test mechanic you mention in gran turismo?

@Felthry They're a series of basic race driving skill tests in isolation. Acceleration and braking, basic cornering, a variety of different kinds of corners by themselves or in series ... basically practice drills on all the parts of driving a car in a sim racing game, like practicing scales for a musician.