The console that brought the arcade home and effectively created the cartridge-based gaming industry as we know it.
Atari 2600 was a genuine nationwide craze decades before "going viral" was a phrase — and it's still made and sold today. This is a genuine pre-internet product — a real, nationwide sales phenomenon decades before social media existed, spread by nothing but word of mouth, in-store demonstration, and traditional advertising. Many of these are still in production today, largely unchanged.
Released in September 1977 at $189.95 (about $1,010 in today's dollars), it became by far the best-selling console of its console generation, ahead of the Intellivision and ColecoVision.