The Pong craze hit.  As a 7 year old only child way before the Internet, the highlight of the Christmas season was getting the Sears Toy Catalog and marking everything I wanted Santa to bring.  Since I was a geek-in-training, I also salivated over the Radio Shack catalog.  Sometime around 1977, my parents gave in and bought me this for Christmas:

Christmas came, I opened it, and rushed to hook it up to the RCA color TV we had recently bought.  I turned it on... and it caught the curtains behind the TV on fire!  Back to Radio Shack it went for a refund, and I went back to feeding quarters into the Pong machine at the Blue Bird Cafe.