From Pong to Pokémon: A history of holiday ‘It’ toys – The New York Times

1970s: After the initial success of its electronic table-tennis game Pong, the arcade pioneer Atari went big in 1977 with its first major home gaming console, which proved an immediate hit despite its hefty price tag — about $200, or nearly $1,000 in today’s currency. … Texas Instruments’ Speak & Spell, with its predictive coding speech synthesizer, gave language learning a talky-robot twist, while “Star Wars” action figures, an early pioneer of the blockbuster movie-to-toy pipeline, flooded the market after the film’s 1977 release.