90s and 2000s Trivia
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This 90s and 2000s trivia quiz has 49 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 49 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
The Start button and taskbar: Windows 95 introduced both, and Microsoft licensed the Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' for its launch 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
Entirely with computer animation: Toy Story was the first fully computer-animated feature film, and director John Lasseter received a Special Achievement Oscar for it.
Q 03Which 1997 film was the first ever to gross $1 billion at the box office?
Titanic
Titanic: James Cameron's film became the first to pass $1 billion worldwide in 1998 and won 11 Oscars, equalling Ben-Hur's record.
Q 04Which 1993 film held the title of highest-grossing movie of all time until 1997?
Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park: Spielberg's 1993 film, mixing ILM computer graphics with Stan Winston's animatronics, grossed more than $900 million and held the all-time box-office record for four years.
Q 05The Matrix (1999) made famous a slow-motion camera trick known as what?
Bullet time
Bullet time: an arc of cameras fires in sequence so the shot seems to orbit a frozen moment; the film won four technical Oscars.
Q 06Nirvana's Nevermind knocked which superstar's album off the top of the Billboard chart in January 1992?
Michael Jackson's Dangerous
Michael Jackson's Dangerous: Nevermind replaced Dangerous at number one on the Billboard 200 in January 1992, a moment often cited as grunge's arrival in the mainstream.
Q 07The Spice Girls' 1996 debut single went to number one in how many countries?
37
37: 'Wannabe' reached number one in 37 countries and spent seven weeks atop the UK chart in 1996.
Q 08The Backstreet Boys formed in 1993 in which city?
Orlando
Orlando: the group was assembled in Orlando, Florida, in 1993 by promoter Lou Pearlman, who also put together NSYNC there.
Q 09Which sitcom, set in a Manhattan coffee house called Central Perk, ran on NBC from 1994 to 2004?
Friends
Friends: the NBC sitcom about six twentysomethings, with Central Perk as their hangout, ran ten seasons and 236 episodes from 1994 to 2004.
Q 10Seinfeld's 1998 finale was watched by roughly how many Americans?
76 million
76 million: the May 1998 finale drew about 76 million American viewers, one of the largest audiences for any series finale, behind M*A*S*H's 1983 send-off.
Q 11In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith's character grew up in which city before moving to Bel-Air?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia: the theme song tells how Will was 'born and raised' in West Philadelphia before being sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Bel-Air.
Q 12Which console, launched in 1996, stuck with cartridges while its rivals moved to CDs?
Nintendo 64
Nintendo 64: Nintendo kept cartridges for fast loading while the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn used CDs; Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64 were its only North American launch games.
Q 13The Tamagotchi's name combines the Japanese words for 'egg' and what?
Watch
Watch: the name blends tamago, Japanese for egg, with uotchi, the Japanese rendering of 'watch'; Bandai released it in November 1996.
Q 21The Y2K bug arose because early programmers stored years using how many digits?
Two
Two: storing years as two digits meant 2000 could be read as 1900; roughly $300 billion was spent worldwide on fixes and the actual failures were minor.
Q 22The Sopranos, which began on HBO in 1999, follows a mob boss who reluctantly starts doing what?
Seeing a psychiatrist
Seeing a psychiatrist: Tony Soprano starts therapy with Dr. Jennifer Melfi after panic attacks, and the sessions frame the series from its 1999 pilot.
Q 23The Nokia 3310, announced in 2000 and famously indestructible, sold roughly how many units?
126 million
126 million: Nokia sold about 126 million 3310s, a run that helped earn it a Finnish 'national emoji' in 2015 and a €49 remake in 2017.
Q 14In 1999 the NSA banned Furbies from its buildings over fears the toys could do what?
Record conversations
Record conversations: the NSA feared Furbies could record and repeat classified talk, but the manufacturer said the toy has no recording ability and merely swaps Furbish for English words on a schedule.
Q 15What were the first two Pokémon games, released for the Game Boy in Japan in 1996?
Red and Green
Red and Green: Pocket Monsters Red and Green launched in Japan in February 1996 with 151 Pokémon; the West got the revised Red and Blue in 1998.
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
An adult body cell: Dolly was cloned from a mammary gland cell of an adult ewe, hence the Dolly Parton name; her remains are displayed at the National Museum of Scotland 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
500: Bloomsbury's first printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in June 1997 was just 500 copies, around 300 of them for libraries.
Q 19Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as graduate students at which university?
Stanford
Stanford: Page and Brin met at Stanford in 1995 and built the search engine there as a research project called BackRub before incorporating Google in 1998.
Q 20Napster, launched in June 1999, let people share what?
MP3 music files
MP3 music files: Napster let users swap MP3s peer to peer, reaching about 80 million registered users before lawsuits by Metallica, Dr. Dre and the record labels 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
Six months: the Razor sold more than five million scooters in its first six months of 2000 and was named Toy of the Year, while emergency rooms logged a spike in scooter injuries.
Q 25Roughly how many PlayStation 2 consoles were sold over its 2000-2013 production run?
160 million
160 million: Sony put PS2 lifetime sales at about 160 million units, helped by a built-in DVD player and a production run that lasted until 2013.
Q 26Which 2001 film won the very first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature?
Shrek
Shrek: DreamWorks' ogre comedy beat Monsters, Inc. and Jimmy Neutron to the inaugural Best Animated Feature Oscar in March 2002; it was based on William Steig's 1990 picture book.
Q 27Steve Jobs launched the first iPod in October 2001 with which slogan?
1,000 songs in your pocket
1,000 songs in your pocket: the first iPod's 5 GB hard drive held about a thousand songs; Apple retired the last iPod, the touch, in 2022 after roughly 450 million sales.
Q 28The Bratz dolls, launched in 2001, originally came as Cloe, Jade, Sasha and who?
Yasmin
Yasmin: the original 2001 quartet was Cloe, Jade, Sasha and Yasmin, designed by Carter Bryant for MGA Entertainment, whose founder Isaac Larian named Yasmin after his daughter.
Q 29The Fox singing contest that crowned Kelly Clarkson its first winner in 2002 was based on which British show?
Pop Idol
Pop Idol: Simon Fuller's ITV show, won by Will Young in early 2002, was the template for American Idol, which Kelly Clarkson won over Justin Guarini that September.
Q 30Crocs, the foam clogs launched in 2002, were first sold at what kind of event?
A boat show
A boat show: Crocs debuted the 'Beach' clog at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show in November 2002, selling all 200 pairs; the charms for its holes are called Jibbitz.