The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind began as an idea during the development of Daggerfall, and it was first planned to be set in the Summerset Isles. Bethesda then set the game in the province of Morrowind, with a dynamic blight that would spread across the land. The original design was judged too ambitious for the technology of the time, and the project was put on hold in 1997. When it returned, the team replaced its engine with a licensed one and hand-built the game world rather than generating it randomly as in earlier titles. Bethesda first spent a year developing The Elder Scrolls Construction Set so the team could balance and modify the game in small steps. The project reportedly took close to 100 man-years of work. Morrowind was released for PC in 2002, followed by an Xbox version.

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.