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50 free 1997 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
1997 is usually remembered for a handful of enormous headlines: Diana's death in Paris, the Hong Kong handover, Titanic sweeping the cinemas and a boy wizard arriving in bookshops. This quiz leaves those to the decade pages and digs into the rest of the year: the election-night upsets, the devolution votes, the supercentenarian in Arles, the space station that sprang a leak and the DVD-by-post start-up nobody had heard of. The fifty questions run across world news, British life, film, television, music, sport and science, plus the births and deaths that turned out to matter. Every question carries a clue in the stem, so a player who lived through the year can reason towards the answer, and every explanation adds one more thing worth knowing. It suits pub quiz hosts building a year-themed round, anyone who was there at the time and wants to test what stuck, and younger players curious about the year so many of today's stars were born.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which software giant's $150 million stake in a struggling Apple did Steve Jobs announce at a Macworld Expo keynote?
Microsoft
Microsoft put $150 million into Apple and pledged five more years of Office for the Mac; Jobs told the crowd Apple had to let go of the idea that for it to win, Microsoft had to lose.
Q 02Which DVD-by-post start-up did Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph found in Scotts Valley, California, that August?
Netflix
Netflix was founded on 29 August 1997 as a DVD-rental-by-mail service and did not rent its first disc until April 1998; the subscription model only arrived in September 1999.
Q 03Jeanne Calment of Arles, who claimed to have met Van Gogh as a girl, died in August at what record age?
122
Jeanne Calment was 122 years and 164 days old when she died on 4 August 1997, still the longest verified human life; she said her future husband introduced her to Van Gogh in her uncle's fabric shop.
Q 04Which comedy about six jobless Sheffield men forming a striptease act became Britain's highest-grossing film ever?
The Full Monty
The Full Monty took $257 million worldwide on a budget of about $3.5 million and stayed Britain's biggest box-office hit until Titanic overtook it.
Q 05Who replaced Val Kilmer as Batman opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze in the summer's Batman & Robin?
George Clooney
George Clooney later said of Batman & Robin "I think we might have killed the franchise", and Warner Bros. made no Batman film until Batman Begins in 2005.
Q 06Which number did Major League Baseball retire for every team on the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut?
42
Number 42 was retired for all of baseball in 1997, the first time any sport had honoured a player that way; Mariano Rivera, grandfathered in, was the last to wear it regularly until he retired in 2013.
Q 07Which band's songwriters took the royalties from The Verve's 'Bitter Sweet Symphony' after a lawsuit over its sample?
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took the songwriting credit because the hook was lifted from an orchestral cover of their 'The Last Time'; they handed the credits and royalties back to Richard Ashcroft in 2019.
Q 08Which future Nobel Peace laureate, shot by the Taliban at 15, was born in Pakistan's Swat valley that July?
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai, born on 12 July 1997, became the youngest Nobel laureate in history when she received the Peace Prize at 17.
Q 09In which African country did Princess Diana walk through a half-cleared minefield at Huambo that January?
Angola
Angola's minefields, being cleared by the HALO Trust, brought the charity global coverage and tied Diana's final year to the campaign that produced the Ottawa mine-ban treaty that December.
Q 10Which online bookseller floated on the Nasdaq that May at $18 a share, then waited until late 2001 for a profit?
Amazon
Amazon's IPO on 15 May 1997 valued a two-year-old bookshop that did not make a profit until the fourth quarter of 2001, when it earned one cent a share on revenue above $1 billion.
Q 11Which Ghanaian diplomat, the first UN Secretary-General promoted from its own staff, took office on 1 January?
Kofi Annan
Kofi Annan spent two terms at the top of the United Nations and shared the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize with the organisation itself.
Q 12Which Spielberg sequel, the widest cinema release ever at the time, took Ian Malcolm to a second dinosaur island?
The Lost World
The Lost World: Jurassic Park opened in a record 3,281 North American cinemas and went on to gross $618.6 million worldwide.
Q 13Which David E. Kelley legal comedy, new on Fox in September, made Calista Flockhart and a dancing baby famous?
Ally McBeal
Q 21Which architect of 'one country, two systems' died in Beijing in February, months before Hong Kong's return to China?
Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping died on 19 February 1997 at 92 from late-stage Parkinson's disease complicated by a lung infection, and never saw the handover he had negotiated with Britain in the 1980s.
Q 22Which Tommy Boy star died in his Chicago apartment in December aged 33, the age at which his idol John Belushi died?
Chris Farley
Chris Farley died of a cocaine-and-morphine 'speedball' overdose on 18 December 1997, the same drug combination and the same age that killed Belushi fifteen years earlier.
Q 23Which Canadian became Formula One champion after Michael Schumacher drove into him at Jerez and was disqualified?
Ally McBeal used the dancing baby in its fantasy sequences, turning one of the internet's first viral animations into a prime-time fixture for a show that ran until 2002.
Q 14Which former Neighbours actress debuted with 'Torn', a cover that spent three November weeks at UK number two?
Natalie Imbruglia
Natalie Imbruglia's 'Torn' had already been recorded in Danish and by the Los Angeles band Ednaswap, yet her version topped the US radio airplay chart for 11 straight weeks.
Q 15Which 'Annie's Song' singer died in October when his home-built Long-EZ plane crashed into Monterey Bay?
John Denver
John Denver had run out of fuel in one tank and could not reach the selector valve behind his shoulder to switch to the other; the FAA had revoked his medical certificate the year before.
Q 16Michael Hutchence, found dead in a Sydney hotel room in November aged 37, fronted which Australian band?
INXS
INXS lost Hutchence at the Ritz-Carlton in Double Bay, and the state coroner ruled the death a suicide while he was depressed and under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
Q 17Which 16-year-old Swiss became tennis's youngest world number one in March and won three of the year's Grand Slams?
Martina Hingis
Martina Hingis won the Australian Open at 16 years and 3 months, became Wimbledon's youngest champion since 1887, and beat Venus Williams in the US Open final.
Q 18Which gymnast, the most decorated in the sport's history, was born in Columbus, Ohio, that March?
Simone Biles
Simone Biles was born on 14 March 1997, the third of four siblings, and is now formally Simone Arianne Biles Owens following her marriage.
Q 19Which tennis player, born that October to a Haitian father, became the first Asian singles world number one in 2019?
Naomi Osaka
Naomi Osaka was born on 16 October 1997 and held the top ranking for 25 weeks from January 2019, the first Asian player of either sex to get there in singles.
Q 20Which French explorer, co-developer of the Aqua-Lung and captain of the Calypso, died in Paris in June aged 87?
Jacques Cousteau
Jacques Cousteau tested the first Aqua-Lung prototype in 1943 with engineer Émile Gagnan, and the device made extended underwater exploration possible for the first time.
Jacques Villeneuve
Jacques Villeneuve limped home third to win the crown by three points, and the FIA's unprecedented decision to strip Schumacher of his second place let him keep his race wins.
Q 24Which Manchester United forward stunned football by retiring at 30 in May, days after winning the Premier League?
Eric Cantona
Eric Cantona swapped the pitch for the screen, playing a French ambassador in Elizabeth the following year and later starring in Ken Loach's Looking for Eric.
Q 25Which horse race was run on a Monday after IRA bomb threats forced 60,000 people out of Aintree on the Saturday?
The Grand National
The Grand National went ahead 49 hours late in front of 20,000 spectators, with Lord Gyllene winning by 25 lengths at 14/1; the evacuation had left 20,000 racegoers stranded with their cars locked inside the course.
Q 26Which Oasis songwriter posed with Tony Blair at a Downing Street party for celebrities who had backed New Labour?
Noel Gallagher
Noel Gallagher was criticised for going, and answered that his parents had raised him to see Labour as the party of working people and that he had gone to meet the Labour prime minister, not the man.
Q 27Which royal yacht was decommissioned in December at a ceremony where the Queen was reported to have cried?
HMY Britannia
HMY Britannia was paid off on 11 December 1997 and is now permanently berthed at Leith in Edinburgh, where she draws over 300,000 visitors a year.
Q 28Two Firearms Acts passed after the Dunblane school shooting banned private ownership of which weapons in Great Britain?
Handguns
Handguns above .22 calibre were outlawed by the first Act, passed under the Conservatives, and Tony Blair's new Labour government banned the remaining .22 pistols later in the year.
Q 29Which dance act's 'Things Can Only Get Better' did Labour adopt as its anthem for the May general election?
D:Ream
D:Ream's keyboard player was Brian Cox, who went on to become a physics professor and the BBC science presenter who co-hosts The Infinite Monkey Cage.
Q 30Which country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo in May after Laurent Kabila's rebels ousted Mobutu?
Zaire
Zaire's name went with Mobutu: he fled Kinshasa on 16 May 1997, the rebels walked into the capital without serious resistance, and Kabila proclaimed himself president the next day.