Myst is an adventure game in which the player travels through a special book to a mysterious island, solving puzzles to visit other worlds called Ages and learn the story behind them. Rather than fighting, players interact with objects in pre-rendered images, which made the game look far more impressive than most at the time. Its designers, Rand and Robyn Miller, had earlier made simple children's games and wanted an adult-oriented, nonlinear mystery. Because CD-ROM drives were slow and consoles had small memory, the team built the game on Apple Macintosh computers and the HyperCard software. Its success helped drive adoption of CD-ROM drives and inspired many imitators.

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.