This 90s and 2000s trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the two decades together, because for anyone who grew up in them they were one long era: Windows 95 and dial-up, Tamagotchis and Furbies, Pokémon Red and Nintendo 64, Titanic and The Matrix, Nirvana and the Spice Girls, Friends and Seinfeld on one side; the Nokia 3310 and the Razr, PlayStation 2 and the Wii, Shrek and Mean Girls, Myspace, YouTube and the first iPhone on the other. Toys, gadgets, movies, TV, music, fashion fads and the odd bit of science (Dolly the sheep, Pluto's demotion) all get a turn. It splits roughly half and half between the decades and mixes easy crowd-pleasers with questions that will separate the people who actually owned a Razor scooter from those who just remember them. Good for a millennial birthday, a themed pub quiz round or a nostalgic night in. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and each question shows the sentence that confirms it once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Windows 95, released in August 1995, introduced which now-familiar feature to the desktop?
The Start button and taskbar
Microsoft paid the Rolling Stones $3 million to use 'Start Me Up' in the ads; a million copies shipped in four days.
Q 02Toy Story, released in 1995, was the first feature film made how?
Entirely with computer animation
It was also Pixar's first feature; Tom Hanks and Tim Allen voiced Woody and Buzz, and John Lasseter won a special Oscar for the technique.
Q 03Which 1997 film was the first ever to gross $1 billion at the box office?
Titanic
It also won 11 Oscars, tying Ben-Hur, and cost about $1 million per minute of screen time to make.
Q 04Which 1993 film held the title of highest-grossing movie of all time until 1997?
Jurassic Park
Spielberg's dinosaurs mixed ILM's computer graphics with Stan Winston's life-sized animatronics; the film took more than $914 million.
Q 05The Matrix (1999) made famous a slow-motion camera trick known as what?
Bullet time
Cameras arranged in an arc fire in sequence so the shot appears to orbit a frozen moment; the film won four Oscars, all technical.
Q 06Nirvana's Nevermind knocked which superstar's album off the top of the Billboard chart in January 1992?
Michael Jackson's Dangerous
The album has sold more than 30 million copies and is credited with finishing off hair metal.
Q 07The Spice Girls' 1996 debut single went to number one in how many countries?
37
The five nicknames were Scary, Sporty, Baby, Ginger and Posh; Geri quit in May 1998 and the group carried on as four.
Q 08The Backstreet Boys, the best-selling boy band ever, formed in 1993 in which city?
Orlando
Their 1999 album Millennium was the best-selling album of that year in the US.
Q 09Which sitcom, set in a Manhattan coffee house called Central Perk, ran on NBC from 1994 to 2004?
Friends
Its finale drew 52.5 million American viewers, the fifth-largest audience for a series finale ever.
Q 10Seinfeld's 1998 finale was watched by roughly how many Americans?
76 million
The show's rule was 'no hugging, no learning'; TV Guide named it the greatest TV show of all time in 2002.
Q 11In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith's character grew up in which city before moving to Bel-Air?
Philadelphia
The show ran from 1990 to 1996; only Smith and James Avery (Uncle Phil) appeared in every episode.
Q 12Which console, launched in 1996, stuck with cartridges while its rivals moved to CDs?
Nintendo 64
Its controller had the first standard analogue thumbstick; only Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64 were there at the North American launch.
Q 13The Tamagotchi's name combines the Japanese words for 'egg' and what?
Watch
Bandai released it in November 1996; its two inventors won an Ig Nobel Prize and more than 98 million have been sold.
Q 21The Y2K bug arose because early programmers stored years using how many digits?
Two
Around $300 billion was spent worldwide on fixes, and the actual failures at midnight were minor, like some Australian bus ticket machines.
Q 22The Sopranos, which began on HBO in 1999, follows a mob boss who reluctantly starts doing what?
Seeing a psychiatrist
Steven Van Zandt was cast as Silvio with no acting experience after David Chase saw him at a Rock Hall induction.
Q 23The Nokia 3310, announced in 2000 and famously indestructible, sold roughly how many units?
126 million
It shipped with Snake II, was made a Finnish 'national emoji' in 2015 and got a €49 remake in 2017.
Q 14In 1999 the NSA banned Furbies from its buildings over fears the toys could do what?
Record conversations
The inventor pointed out a Furby cannot record anything; it just fakes learning English by swapping out Furbish words on a schedule.
Q 15What were the first two Pokémon games, released for the Game Boy in Japan in 1996?
Red and Green
North America got Red and Blue in 1998; the original games had 151 Pokémon and the franchise is now the highest-grossing in the world.
Q 16Beanie Babies fuelled a 1990s collecting bubble largely because their maker Ty did what?
Regularly 'retired' designs
At the peak they made up a tenth of all eBay sales; most are worth almost nothing now.
Q 17Dolly the sheep, born in 1996, was the first mammal cloned from what?
An adult body cell
She was named after Dolly Parton because the cell came from a mammary gland; she is now stuffed and on show in Edinburgh.
Q 18The first Harry Potter book was published in the UK in 1997 with an initial print run of how many copies?
500
The US edition became Sorcerer's Stone because Scholastic thought 'philosopher' sounded too dusty; it has now sold more than 120 million.
Q 19Google was incorporated in 1998, and its name is a misspelling of which very large number?
Googol
Larry Page and Sergey Brin ran it from Susan Wojcicki's garage; the project had earlier been called BackRub.
Q 20Napster, launched in June 1999, let people share what?
MP3 music files
It hit about 80 million users before lawsuits from Metallica, Dr. Dre and the record industry shut it down in July 2001.
Q 24The Razor scooter sold more than 5,000,000 units in how long after its 2000 launch?
Six months
It won Toy of the Year the same year; emergency rooms saw a spike in scooter injuries soon after.
Q 25The PlayStation 2, released in 2000, is the best-selling console ever. Roughly how many were sold?
160 million
A built-in DVD player helped: at launch it cost about the same as a standalone DVD player, and it stayed in production until 2013.
Q 26Which 2001 film won the very first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature?
Shrek
Mike Myers gave the ogre a Scottish accent; the film was loosely based on a 1990 picture book by William Steig.
Q 27Steve Jobs launched the first iPod in October 2001 with which slogan?
1,000 songs in your pocket
It had a 5 GB hard drive; the iTunes Store followed in April 2003 and Apple sold about 450 million iPods before retiring the line in 2022.
Q 28The Bratz dolls, launched in 2001, originally came as Cloe, Jade, Sasha and who?
Yasmin
By 2005 they had grabbed about 40 percent of the fashion-doll market; a decade-long court fight with Mattel ended in MGA's favour.
Q 29The Fox singing contest that crowned Kelly Clarkson its first winner in 2002 was based on which British show?
Pop Idol
Kelly Clarkson won season one against Justin Guarini; the show topped the US ratings for eight straight years.
Q 30Crocs, the foam clogs launched in 2002, were first sold at what kind of event?
A boat show
All 200 pairs of the original 'Beach' model sold out; the charms that plug the holes are called Jibbitz.