The Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972, had no software at all. Its game cards were printed circuit boards that plugged in and changed the internal wiring like a set of switches, so the same cards could run different games with different overlays. It drew only white shapes on a black screen, with three dots and a line, and it used diode-transistor logic built from discrete parts. Its light gun was designed by Nintendo based on a 1970 toy.

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.