Final Fantasy X, released in 2001 for the PlayStation 2, replaced the series' Active Time Battle system with Conditional Turn-Based Battle, where each character's turn depends on a timer that the player can influence. Its Sphere Grid replaced fixed experience levels with a board of nodes that characters unlock by spending points, so players choose their own path of growth. The game was the first in the main series to feature fully three-dimensional areas and voice acting. Its setting, the world of Spira, borrows from the South Pacific, Thailand and Japan, and its city of Zanarkand was partly inspired by Samarkand in Uzbekistan. It sold over 8.5 million units on the PlayStation 2 and is often cited among the greatest video games ever made.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.