1997 Trivia
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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 rival'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 to keep making Office for the Mac, and Jobs told the Macworld crowd to stop treating the two companies as rivals.
Q 02Which DVD-by-post start-up did Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph found in Scotts Valley, California, that August?
Netflix
Netflix offered itself to Blockbuster for $50 million in 2000 and, its finance chief later said, was laughed out of the office; Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy ten years later.
Q 03Jeanne Calment, who died that August at a record 122, said she had met which painter as a girl?
Van Gogh
Van Gogh lived and painted in Arles, where she was born. She later outlived the man who agreed, when she was 90, to pay her a monthly sum for her flat on her death; he paid more than twice its value and died first.
Q 04Which comedy about six jobless Sheffield men forming a striptease act briefly became Britain's highest-grossing film of all time?
The Full Monty
The Full Monty cost about $3.5 million, took $257 million worldwide and beat Titanic to the BAFTA for Best Film, though Titanic soon took its British box-office record.
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 Nobel Peace laureate, born that July, became the youngest winner in the prize's history at 17?
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai was born in Pakistan's Swat valley on 12 July 1997, survived a Taliban gunman's bullet at 15 and shared the Peace Prize two years later.
Q 09In which country did Princess Diana walk through a minefield being cleared at Huambo that January?
Angola
Angola's minefields put Diana at odds with the government, where a defence minister called her a 'loose cannon' for backing a ban; the Ottawa treaty outlawing the mines was signed that December.
Q 10Which dot-com floated on the Nasdaq that May at $18 a share, then waited until late 2001 for its first profit?
Amazon
Amazon's IPO on 15 May 1997 valued a bookshop barely two years online; its first profit came in the last quarter of 2001, one cent a share on sales above $1 billion.
Q 11Which diplomat, the first UN Secretary-General promoted from its own staff, took office on 1 January?
Kofi Annan
Kofi Annan got the job after the United States vetoed a second term for Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and went on to share 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 was the only sequel Michael Crichton ever wrote, and it had to revive Ian Malcolm, who was reported dead at the end of the first novel.
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 negotiated Hong Kong's return himself, meeting Margaret Thatcher in Beijing in 1982 and refusing to let Britain keep any part of the colony, but he died too soon to see it.
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 had followed his idol step for step, from Chicago's Second City theatre to Saturday Night Live, and a cocaine-and-morphine overdose killed him at the same age.
Q 23Which Canadian became Formula One champion after Michael Schumacher drove into him at Jerez and was disqualified?
Ally McBeal's heroine ended up on a 1998 Time cover beside Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, under the headline 'Is Feminism Dead?'
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' was a hand-me-down: it had already been released in Danish and by the Los Angeles band Ednaswap before her cover made it a worldwide hit.
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 performed with guest singers, then chose a new frontman in 2005 through a television talent contest, Rock Star: INXS, won by the Canadian J.D. Fortune.
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, born in Columbus, Ohio, that March, won four gold medals at the 2016 Rio Olympics?
Simone Biles
Simone Biles was born on 14 March 1997 and was adopted, with her younger sister, by her grandfather and his wife Nellie, whom she calls Mom.
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 in Osaka on 16 October 1997, beat her childhood idol Serena Williams to win the 2018 US Open, and lit the cauldron at the Tokyo Olympics.
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 later stripped Schumacher of his second place in the championship while letting him keep his race wins.
Q 24Which Manchester United captain 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 was run 49 hours late and won by Lord Gyllene by 25 lengths; the evacuation had stranded thousands overnight, their cars locked inside the course while police searched them.
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's clocks all stand stopped at 3.01, the minute the Queen stepped ashore for the last time; the yacht is now a floating museum at Leith in Edinburgh.
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.