The Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial home video game console, released in the United States in September 1972. Ralph Baer and a small team at Sanders Associates designed it, and it plugged into a television with two wired controllers. It could show only three square dots and a single line, in black and white, and it had no sound or scoring. Players placed plastic overlays on the screen to suggest extra visuals, and the box came with dice and paper money for board-game style play. Magnavox sold 69,000 units in its first calendar year and 350,000 before it was discontinued in 1975.

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.