50 free 80s and 90s trivia questions with answers. This 80s and 90s trivia quiz treats the two decades as one long stretch of shared memory: the Walkman and the Game Boy, Live Aid and Farm Aid, Cabbage Patch parodies and POGs, the DynaTAC brick phone and the Nokia with no antenna, the Challenger and the Channel Tunnel, the Miracle on Ice and the Dream Team, Buster Douglas and Kerri Strug. Music, movies, TV, toys and fads, tech, sports, food and ads, and the news events everyone remembers watching all get a turn, with roughly 50 questions from each decade. It deliberately skips the questions every retro quiz asks. Instead of the year the Berlin Wall fell, it asks about the botched press conference that opened it; instead of naming the Space Shuttle, it asks what Christa McAuliffe taught. Expect a mix of easy crowd-pleasers, real head-scratchers and a few that only people who were there will get. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and primary sources, and each question shows the sentence that confirms it after you answer. Good for a Gen X or elder-millennial birthday, a themed pub quiz round, or settling an argument in the group chat.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under which name was Sony's portable cassette player first sold in the United States instead of Walkman?
Sound-about
Overseas sales teams disliked the made-up Japanese-English name, so it was Stowaway in the UK and Freestyle in Australia and Sweden before Walkman won everywhere.
Q 02Who scored the go-ahead goal with exactly 10:00 left in the 1980 Miracle on Ice game?
Mike Eruzione
The team captain's shot made it 4-3, the Americans' first lead of the game; two days later they beat Finland for the gold medal.
Q 03Which subject did Challenger's Christa McAuliffe teach at Concord High School?
Social studies
She was picked from more than 11,000 applicants and had planned to teach two lessons from orbit, including a tour of the shuttle.
Q 04On 9 November 1989, what did Günter Schabowski answer when asked when new travel rules would take effect?
Immediately, without delay
He had missed the meeting where the rules were discussed and improvised; crowds took him at his word and were at the Berlin Wall crossings that same night.
Q 05Whose 'new ideas' did Mondale attack with a fast-food catchphrase in a 1984 primary debate?
Gary Hart
The line came from Wendy's 'Fluffy Bun' ad, in which Clara Peller inspects a huge bun with a tiny patty and demands to know where the beef is.
Q 06Trivial Pursuit, the board game craze of the mid-1980s, was invented in 1979 in which city?
Montreal
A photo editor and a sports editor came up with it over a game of Scrabble; between 1983 and 1988 it sold 30 million copies.
Q 07The falling-blocks game bundled with the Game Boy in 1989 was written in which country?
Soviet Union
Alexey Pajitnov built it on an Elektronika 60 at a Moscow computing centre while working on speech recognition and artificial intelligence.
Q 08Namco renamed its 1980 maze game from Puck Man for the North American release. What was the worry?
Vandals would change the P into an F
The original title came from the Japanese phrase paku paku taberu, the sound of gobbling something up.
Q 09Whose onstage remark at Live Aid inspired the first Farm Aid concert in September 1985?
Bob Dylan
He suggested a million or two of the Live Aid money could pay off some farm mortgages; Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Neil Young then staged the show in Champaign, Illinois.
Q 10Which actor spent weeks filming as Marty McFly before Michael J. Fox replaced him?
Eric Stoltz
Fox was the first choice but tied up with Family Ties; the replacement was told on 10 January 1985 and much of the film was reshot.
Q 11In November 1987 someone in a Max Headroom mask hijacked the signals of two TV stations in which city?
Chicago
WGN-TV and WTTW were both interrupted the same night; nobody has ever been identified as the culprit.
Q 12Before they were toys or a cartoon, the Care Bears were painted in 1981 for what product?
Greeting cards
Artist Elena Kucharik painted them for American Greetings, the same company behind Strawberry Shortcake.
Q 13The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, the first commercial handheld cell phone, sold in 1984 at what price?
$3,995
For that you got about 30 minutes of talk time after a charge that took roughly 10 hours.
Q 21For how long did participants in Hands Across America hold hands on 25 May 1986?
15 minutes
Roughly 5 million people joined the coast-to-coast line on Memorial Day weekend to raise money for hunger and homelessness.
Q 22Michael Jackson first performed the moonwalk on TV at a 1983 anniversary special for which record label?
Motown
He mimed to 'Billie Jean', the only non-label song on the show, on NBC's 25th-anniversary special aired 16 May 1983.
Q 23The Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound in March 1989. What did it strike?
Bligh Reef
Around 10.8 million US gallons of crude poured out; the reef itself is named after William Bligh of Bounty fame, who sailed with Cook.
Q 14In which Texas city was 18-month-old 'Baby Jessica' McClure rescued from a well in October 1987?
Midland
Rescuers took 58 hours to free her from an 8-inch well casing about 22 feet down.
Q 15How did Phil Collins play both the London and Philadelphia halves of Live Aid in 1985?
He flew on Concorde
Noel Edmonds flew him by helicopter from Wembley to Heathrow, then a British Airways Concorde got him to New York and another helicopter to JFK Stadium.
Q 16Which producer talked Run-DMC into remaking Aerosmith's 'Walk This Way' in 1986?
Rick Rubin
It reached No. 4 on the Hot 100, higher than the original, and became the first hip hop single in the Billboard top five.
Q 17Teddy Ruxpin, one of the best-selling toys of 1985 and 1986, told stories using what hidden in his back?
A cassette deck
His mouth and eyes moved in sync with the tape; maker Worlds of Wonder later also launched Lazer Tag.
Q 18The 1985 Garbage Pail Kids sticker cards, spoofing the Cabbage Patch Kids, were created by which cartoonist?
Art Spiegelman
He was a consultant for Topps at the time and had already created Wacky Packages; his graphic novel Maus won a Pulitzer in 1992.
Q 19Swatch, the plastic Swiss watch brand launched in 1983, is a contraction of which phrase?
Second watch
The idea was a cheap, high-tech watch you could own as a spare or a fashion accessory; the first collection of twelve models debuted in Zürich on 1 March 1983.
Q 20Chicken McNuggets went nationwide in the US in 1983. Which of these is one of the four official shapes?
The boot
The others are the bell, the ball and the bone (also called the bow-tie).
Q 24The Simpsons began in 1987 as short cartoons on which Fox sketch-comedy series?
The Tracey Ullman Show
Forty-eight shorts ran over three seasons, starting with 'Good Night' on 19 April 1987, before the family got its own series in December 1989.
Q 25Which Nintendo engineer led the team that designed the Game Boy, released in 1989?
Gunpei Yokoi
He also created the Game & Watch line; the original handheld's screen showed four shades of grey-green and the console family went on to sell nearly 119 million units.
Q 26By roughly how many points per game did the 1992 Dream Team beat its opponents at the Barcelona Olympics?
44
Charles Barkley led the team in scoring, and its closest game was a 32-point win over Croatia in the final.
Q 27Elwood Edwards, the voice of AOL's 'You've got mail', was paid how much in 1989 to record it?
$200
His wife worked at the company and overheard CEO Steve Case say he wanted a voice on the service; Edwards recorded the lines on a cassette deck in his living room.
Q 28Where did Massachusetts programmer David Eddy coin the abbreviation 'Y2K' in June 1995?
An email
David Eddy said rivals like CDC (Century Date Change) and FADL (Faulty Date Logic) were floating around and Y2K just came off his fingertips; the world spent an estimated $308 billion on fixes.
Q 29Which IBM computer first beat a reigning world chess champion in a match in May 1997?
Deep Blue
Garry Kasparov had won their first match in Philadelphia in 1996 by 4-2; the New York rematch went 3.5-2.5 the machine's way.
Q 30The Channel Tunnel was officially opened in May 1994 by Queen Elizabeth II and which French president?
François Mitterrand
The ceremony in Calais came a year later than planned; the tunnel's 37.9 km undersea stretch is still the longest of any tunnel in the world.