Classic Video Game Trivia
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This classic video game trivia quiz has 100 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 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which company released Pong in 1972?
Atari
Atari released Pong in November 1972; Allan Alcorn built it as a training exercise set by Nolan Bushnell, and the prototype proved 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
The Magnavox Odyssey, developed from Ralph Baer's 'Brown Box' prototype, reached stores in September 1972 as the first commercial home console; Magnavox later took Pong's maker to court for patent infringement and won a licensing settlement.
Q 03What was the first commercially available arcade video game, released in 1971?
Computer Space
Computer Space, built by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney from the mainframe game Spacewar!, was sold by Nutting Associates in fibreglass cabinets; roughly 1,300 to 1,500 were made.
Q 04How did players of the first home console, in 1972, get colour graphics for its games?
Plastic overlays stuck to the TV screen
Plastic overlays stuck to the TV screen supplied the colour: the console's hardware drew only white squares and lines, so each game shipped with a translucent screen overlay plus dice, cards and paper money.
Q 05Which Japanese company released the 1978 alien-shooting hit that started the arcade golden age?
Taito
Taito released Tomohiro Nishikado's alien shooter in 1978; by 1982 it had taken an estimated $3.8 billion in coins, and it set off the wave of arcade hits that followed.
Q 06What was Pac-Man's original title in Japan?
Puck Man
Puck Man, from the Japanese 'paku-paku' for munching, was the name on Namco's 1980 Japanese cabinets; Midway renamed it for America, fearing vandals would scratch the P into an F.
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
Level 256 is the kill screen: an 8-bit level counter overflows, the fruit-drawing routine corrupts the right half of the maze with garbage, and too few dots remain to finish the board.
Q 09Ms. Pac-Man began life as an unauthorised modification kit called what?
Crazy Otto
Crazy Otto was General Computer Corporation's unauthorised enhancement kit for Pac-Man; bound by a lawsuit settlement over an earlier kit, GCC sold it to Midway, which released it as Ms. Pac-Man in 1982.
Q 10Donkey Kong was created in 1981 to reuse unsold cabinets from which failed Nintendo arcade game?
Radar Scope
Radar Scope had flopped in America, leaving Nintendo of America with about 2,000 unsold cabinets; president Hiroshi Yamauchi handed the conversion job to first-time designer Shigeru Miyamoto.
Q 11By what name was Mario sometimes known in the original Donkey Kong?
Jumpman
Jumpman was the hero's name in the original 1981 Donkey Kong's arcade materials; Nintendo of America staff nicknamed him Mario after their warehouse landlord, Mario Segale, and the name stuck.
Q 12On which Soviet computer did Alexey Pajitnov first program his falling-blocks puzzle game?
Elektronika 60
Elektronika 60, a Soviet PDP-11-compatible machine at the Academy of Sciences computing centre in Moscow, was where Pajitnov wrote the 1984 original in Pascal; it had no graphics, so bricks were drawn with bracket characters.
Q 13Which entrepreneur negotiated the falling-blocks handheld rights for Nintendo's Game Boy in 1989?
Henk Rogers
Q 21How many cabinets did Williams' Defender sell, making it the company's best-selling game?
55,000
About 55,000 Defender cabinets were sold, a Williams record; it was the first video game from Eugene Jarvis, who had previously programmed the company's pinball machines such as Firepower.
Q 22Which 1981 Atari arcade game, co-designed by Dona Bailey, was one of the first widely played by women?
Centipede
Centipede, co-designed by Dona Bailey and Ed Logg and released in 1981, used a trackball to shoot a centipede winding through a mushroom field; its pastel look and Bailey's involvement drew an unusually large female following.
Q 23How many cities does the player defend in Missile Command?
Six
Henk Rogers flew to Moscow in February 1989 on a tourist visa and dealt directly with Elektronorgtechnica (ELORG), the Soviet licensing body, securing the handheld rights for Nintendo.
Q 14What was the console later known as the 2600 called when it launched in September 1977?
Atari Video Computer System
Atari Video Computer System, or VCS, was the launch name; Stella had been its development codename, and the console was renamed the Atari 2600 in November 1982 after its model number CX2600.
Q 15Which arcade conversion in 1980 became the Atari 2600's first killer app?
Space Invaders
Space Invaders, released for the VCS in March 1980 as the first officially licensed arcade conversion for a home console, became the system's first killer app and drove a surge in console sales.
Q 16How long did Howard Scott Warshaw have to develop E.T. for the Atari 2600?
Just over five weeks
Just over five weeks: the licence was finalised in late July 1982 and the code had to be finished by 1 September to make the holiday season, leaving Warshaw barely more than a month to design and program it.
Q 17In which town's landfill were unsold E.T. cartridges confirmed buried when diggers investigated in 2014?
Alamogordo, New Mexico
Alamogordo, New Mexico: in April 2014 a documentary crew excavated the town landfill and unearthed E.T. and other cartridges dumped there in September 1983, confirming a story long dismissed as urban legend.
Q 18By roughly what percentage did US home video game revenue fall between 1983 and 1985?
97%
A fall of about 97%: US home video game revenue dropped from roughly $3.2 billion in 1983 to around $100 million in 1985 as a glut of poor-quality games and consoles swamped the market.
Q 19Which Atari 2600 game contains the first widely known video game Easter egg?
Adventure
Adventure (1980) hides a secret room displaying 'Created by Warren Robinett'; he planted it because the company refused to credit programmers, and 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
A grue, a lurking creature Dave Lebling borrowed from Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories, eats anyone who moves about in darkness; it replaced the bottomless pits of early versions, which made no sense in an attic.
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!?
20 minutes
20 minutes is the limit: a timer counts down from 20:00 while Harry hunts 32 treasures across 255 screens; David Crane built the 1982 Activision game around a running-man animation he had made first.
Q 25What was the NES called in Japan, where it launched in July 1983?
Famicom
Famicom, short for Family Computer, launched in Japan on 15 July 1983; Masayuki Uemura led its design, and the redesigned NES version went on to revive the American market after the 1983 crash.
Q 26What was R.O.B., bundled with early NES sets to reassure toy stores?
A toy robot
A toy robot: R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy, watched the screen and moved pieces for Gyromite and Stack-Up, letting Nintendo pitch the 1985 Deluxe Set as a toy rather than a video game console.
Q 27Steve Wozniak built the prototype hardware for which 1976 arcade game in under a week?
Breakout
Breakout was the job: Steve Jobs, then working for Nolan Bushnell, brought in his friend Wozniak, who designed a working prototype within days using far fewer chips than the company's engineers expected.
Q 28The Legend of Zelda first launched in Japan in 1986 on which add-on?
Famicom Disk System
Famicom Disk System: Zelda was a launch title for the floppy-disk add-on on 21 February 1986; Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka developed it alongside Super Mario Bros., and Link gathers eight Triforce fragments to beat Ganon.
Q 29On which NES game did the Konami Code first appear?
Gradius
Gradius, the 1986 NES port, was the first: programmer Kazuhisa Hashimoto added the code to give himself a full power-up set while testing and forgot to remove it; Contra later made it famous with 30 lives.
Q 30Which puzzle game was bundled with the Game Boy in North America and Europe?
Tetris
Tetris came in the box with every North American and European Game Boy from 1989; Nintendo chose the puzzle game over a Mario title to reach adults as well as children, and the cartridge sold about 35 million copies.