This classic video game trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the arcade golden age and the console eras that followed it, from Computer Space in 1971 to GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64. Forty-two questions take in Pong and the Magnavox Odyssey lawsuit, Space Invaders' speeding aliens, the ghosts of Pac-Man and the 256th-level kill screen, Donkey Kong and the birth of Mario, Alexey Pajitnov's Tetris, the Atari 2600, E.T. in the New Mexico landfill and the 1983 crash, the NES and R.O.B., Zelda's battery save, the Konami Code, the Game Boy, Sonic versus Mario, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat and the birth of the ESRB, Doom's shareware model and Myst's decade-long PC sales record. Easy questions ask what the four Pac-Man ghosts are called and which company made Pong; hard ones want the coder who hid the first Easter egg in Adventure, the Soviet computer Tetris was written on and how many cabinets Defender sold. Retro gamers, this is your quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the games, consoles and designers, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which company released Pong in 1972?
Atari
Allan Alcorn built it as a training exercise set by Nolan Bushnell, and it turned out too good not to sell.
Q 02Pong's concept was borrowed from a ping-pong game on which console, prompting a patent lawsuit?
Magnavox Odyssey
Ralph Baer's 'Brown Box' became the Odyssey, the first commercial home console, in September 1972.
Q 03What was the first commercially available arcade video game, released in 1971?
Computer Space
Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney based it on Spacewar! and sold roughly 1,300 to 1,500 fibreglass cabinets.
Q 04How did players of the first home console, in 1972, get colour graphics for its games?
Plastic overlays stuck to the TV screen
The console came with dice, paper money and board-game bits; it sold 350,000 units before being discontinued in 1975.
Q 05Which Japanese company released the 1978 alien-shooting hit that started the arcade golden age?
Taito
By 1982 Tomohiro Nishikado's game had grossed $3.8 billion, and it was the first video game with endless gameplay.
Q 06What was Pac-Man's original title in Japan?
Puck Man
Midway changed it for America out of fear vandals would turn the P into an F on cabinets.
Q 07Which of these is NOT one of the four ghosts in the original Pac-Man?
Sue
Sue is the orange ghost in Ms. Pac-Man; the original quartet is Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde.
Q 08Which stage of Pac-Man is impossible to complete because of an integer overflow?
Level 256
Half the screen dissolves into garbage; designer Toru Iwatani had wanted a game women would enjoy as much as men.
Q 09Ms. Pac-Man began life as an unauthorised modification kit called what?
Crazy Otto
General Computer Corporation had to take it to Midway because of earlier legal trouble with another publisher.
Q 10Donkey Kong was created in 1981 to reuse unsold cabinets from which failed Nintendo arcade game?
Radar Scope
President Hiroshi Yamauchi handed the rescue job to first-time designer Shigeru Miyamoto.
Q 11By what name was Mario sometimes known in the original Donkey Kong?
Jumpman
He rescued Pauline, then called 'The Lady', up a New York construction site; it was the first game with a jump button.
Q 12On which Soviet computer did Alexey Pajitnov first program his falling-blocks puzzle game?
Elektronika 60
He wrote it in Pascal in about three weeks; the Game Boy version has since sold 35 million copies.
Q 13Which Dutch-born entrepreneur negotiated the falling-blocks rights for Nintendo's Game Boy in 1989?
Henk Rogers
He dealt directly with the Soviet licensing body Elektronorgtechnica.
Q 21How many cabinets did Williams' Defender sell, making it the company's best-selling game?
55,000
It was pinball programmer Eugene Jarvis's first video game.
Q 22Which 1981 Atari arcade game, co-designed by Dona Bailey, was one of the first widely played by women?
Centipede
Missile Command's Dave Theurer went on to design Tempest.
Q 23How many cities does the player defend in Missile Command?
Six
Released in June 1980 at the height of the Cold War, it used a trackball and three missile bases.
Q 24How much time does Pitfall Harry get to hunt for treasure in Pitfall!?
Q 14What was the console later known as the 2600 called when it launched in September 1977?
Atari Video Computer System
Stella was its codename; the console was only rebranded 2600 in November 1982.
Q 15Which arcade conversion in 1980 became the Atari 2600's first killer app?
Space Invaders
The console launched with nine games including Combat, which was the original pack-in.
Q 16How long did Howard Scott Warshaw have to develop E.T. for the Atari 2600?
Just over five weeks
Rights talks ended in late July 1982 with the Christmas deadline fixed; the game is routinely called the worst ever made.
Q 17In which town's landfill were unsold E.T. cartridges confirmed buried when diggers investigated in 2014?
Alamogordo, New Mexico
For decades the burial had been dismissed as an urban legend.
Q 18By roughly what percentage did US home video game revenue fall between 1983 and 1985?
97%
It went from about $3.2 billion to about $100 million amid a glut of poor-quality games.
Q 19Which Atari 2600 game contains the first widely known video game Easter egg?
Adventure
Warren Robinett hid it because Atari refused to credit programmers; Ready Player One's climax is built around it.
Q 20In the text game Zork, what eats players who wander in the dark without a light?
A grue
Grues replaced deadly pits after a tester fell into one in an attic; the name came from Jack Vance.
20 minutes
David Crane built the game around a realistic running animation he had made first.
Q 25What was the NES called in Japan, where it launched in July 1983?
Famicom
Masayuki Uemura designed it; it sold 61.91 million units and revived American gaming after the crash.
Q 26What was R.O.B., bundled with early NES sets to reassure toy stores?
A toy robot
The Zapper light gun for Duck Hunt was the other add-on.
Q 27Roughly how many copies has Super Mario Bros. sold worldwide?
58 million
Koji Kondo's soundtrack was one of the first to make music central to a game's design.
Q 28The Legend of Zelda first launched in Japan in 1986 on which add-on?
Famicom Disk System
Miyamoto and Tezuka developed it alongside Super Mario Bros.; Link collects eight Triforce fragments to beat Ganon.
Q 29On which NES game did the Konami Code first appear?
Gradius
Contra made it famous in North America by handing out 30 lives, hence the 'Contra Code' nickname.
Q 30Which puzzle game was bundled with the Game Boy in North America and Europe?
Tetris
Gunpei Yokoi's team designed the handheld; 40,000 sold on day one and the line reached about 118 million.