I have to admit, it's amazing how often video games seem to be in the mix these days. Slack was developing a game before they happened upon their product. Gamifcation is being used to help decipher complex genomes etc. Pretty impressive
Also, games back in the days, not being seen as part of the same serious IT industry, a lot of very creative techniques were written ad-hoc without leaking out to the world because they were 'one shot' solutions for the problem at hand.
I think it was Phil Trefford that had articles about embedded DSLs being used quite often in the 80s, to avoid bare metal complexities.