Four programmers at MIT's Dynamic Modelling Group began Zork in 1977, inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure, the first well-known text adventure. They wanted a game with richer typed commands and less obtuse puzzles, so they built it in the MDL language. The game was never announced, but MIT's lax network security meant outsiders could see programs running on the mainframe, so a community quietly found it and sent in playtesting feedback. The developers later made it run on personal microcomputers, splitting it into episodes that could fit on floppy disks. The company they founded, Infocom, went on to sell it commercially.

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.