Early 2000s
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109 free Early 2000s trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
11 free Early 2000s trivia questions with answers. Early 2000s trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is 2000s trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which social network, launched in August 2003, was known for customisable profiles and musicians' pages?
MySpace
MySpace was bought by News Corp for $580 million in 2005, two years after launch, then lost its users to younger rivals and was sold again in 2011 for about $35 million.
Q 02Which film won the first ever Oscar for Best Animated Feature, awarded in March 2002?
Shrek
Shrek won the brand-new award at the 74th Academy Awards. Chris Farley had recorded most of the ogre's lines before he died in 1997, and Mike Myers then redid the part in a Scottish accent.
Q 03Who had a hit song in 2002 with 'Complicated'?
Avril Lavigne
Avril Lavigne was 16 when Arista boss Antonio Reid signed her after a 15-minute audition; 'Complicated', her debut single, went on to earn two Grammy nominations.
Q 04What major global sporting event did Sydney, Australia, host in the year 2000?
Summer Olympics
The Summer Olympics opened in Sydney with Cathy Freeman lighting the cauldron; later in the Games she won the 400 metres in the same stadium, in front of more than 110,000 people.
Q 05Which company dominated the pre-smartphone mobile market with durable devices like the 3310?
Nokia
Nokia began in 1865 as a pulp mill in Finland and later made rubber goods and cables before turning to phones; its 3310, announced in September 2000, became a byword for toughness.
Q 06Which social network, founded in 2004, was at first open only to Harvard students?
Facebook opened as 'The facebook' in February 2004; about 1,200 Harvard students signed up within 24 hours, and more than half the undergraduates had joined within a month.
Q 07Which of these EU members kept its own currency when euro notes and coins arrived in 2002?
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom kept the pound under an opt-out written into the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, while twelve countries swapped francs, marks, lire and more for euro cash on 1 January 2002.
Q 08Which film won all eleven of its nominations at the 2004 Oscars, tying the record?
Return of the King
Return of the King won all eleven, matching the totals of Ben-Hur and Titanic; Peter Jackson had filmed the whole trilogy back to back in New Zealand in one long shoot.
Q 09Which company entered the console market with the original Xbox in November 2001?
Microsoft
Microsoft built the Xbox because Bill Gates feared a rival's next console would draw people away from Windows PCs; the name is short for 'DirectX Box', after the company's graphics software.
Q 10Which portable media player, unveiled on 23 October 2001, promised '1,000 songs in your pocket'?
iPod
The iPod got its name from copywriter Vinnie Chieco, who saw the white prototype and thought of the line 'Open the pod bay doors, HAL' from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Q 11Which singing competition premiered on Fox on 11 June 2002 and ran there for fifteen seasons?
American Idol
American Idol was turned down by US networks until Rupert Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, who had seen Britain's Pop Idol, urged him to buy it for Fox; ABC revived the show in 2018.
Q 12Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Larry Sanger and which entrepreneur?
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales paid for it through his web company Bomis, as a quick side project to Nupedia, an expert-reviewed encyclopedia that had approved only about two dozen articles.
Q 13Which file-sharing service shut down in July 2001 after lawsuits from record labels and the band Metallica?
Napster
Q 21Which console of the early 2000s used miniature discs instead of full-size DVDs, so it could not show films?
GameCube
GameCube games came on small proprietary discs with their own copy protection, so the standard console could not play DVD films; Panasonic sold a hybrid in Japan, the Q, that could.
Q 22Concorde was retired in 2003, three years after which airline's Flight 4590 crashed?
Air France
Air France Flight 4590, leaving Paris, ran over a metal strip that had fallen from another jet onto the runway; a burst tyre ruptured a fuel tank, and all 109 people aboard and four on the ground were killed.
Q 23Which 2001 invention, unveiled after months of speculation, grew out of Dean Kamen's stair-climbing wheelchair, the iBOT?
The Segway
Napster drew Metallica's lawsuit after an unfinished demo of the band's song 'I Disappear' spread on the service and reached radio before its release; a court injunction forced the network offline in July 2001.
Q 14Which early social network, founded by Jonathan Abrams in 2002, signed up three million users within months of going live?
Friendster
Friendster turned down a $30 million buyout offer in 2003, then lost its lead and was sold in 2009 for $26.4 million to a Malaysian company that relaunched it as a gaming site.
Q 15YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?
PayPal
PayPal made Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim wealthy when eBay bought it; they started YouTube in February 2005 and sold it the following year for $1.65 billion.
Q 16Which company went public in August 2004 at $85 a share, raising about $1.67 billion?
Google's founders had tried to sell their search engine to Excite for $1 million in 1999 and were turned down; five years later the flotation valued the company at more than $23 billion.
Q 17Which game came built into the 3310, the famously tough mobile phone launched in 2000?
Snake II
Snake II shipped on the 3310 beside Pairs II, Space Impact and Bantumi; engineer Taneli Armanto had written the first phone Snake in 1997 after a Tetris-style game he planned ran into rights problems.
Q 18Which ultra-thin Motorola clamshell phone, model V3, became a must-have after its 2004 launch?
The Razr
The Razr was launched as an exclusive, high-priced fashion phone, but price cuts turned it into a mass-market hit: Motorola had shipped 50 million by July 2006.
Q 19Which brand of handheld, later famous for its thumb keyboards, began in 1999 as a two-way email pager?
BlackBerry
BlackBerry got its name because the tiny keys looked like the drupelets of the fruit; the first model, the 850, was an email pager, and a version that made calls did not arrive until 2002.
Q 20Which console, launched in 2000, could also show DVD films and went on to sell about 160 million units?
PlayStation 2
PlayStation 2 launched at $299 and played DVD films out of the box, which gave Sony a selling point beyond games; it stayed in production until 2013, six years after the PlayStation 3 arrived.
The Segway reused the balancing technology of the iBOT; investor John Doerr said it would be bigger than the Internet, yet by September 2006 only about 23,500 had been sold.
Q 24The Human Genome Project was declared complete in April 2003, 50 years after scientists first described what?
DNA's double helix
DNA's double helix was described by Watson and Crick in April 1953; fifty years on, the genome project finished more than two years ahead of schedule and under its $3 billion budget.
Q 25Which Mars rover landed in January 2004 for a planned three-month mission and kept working until 2018?
Opportunity
Opportunity outlasted its 90-sol plan by more than 14 years and drove over 45 km, until a planet-wide dust storm in June 2018 cut off its solar power; its twin Spirit had fallen silent in 2010.
Q 26SpaceShipOne won which $10 million prize in 2004 by reaching space twice within two weeks?
Ansari X
Ansari X was modelled on the Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh won in 1927; SpaceShipOne was retired as soon as it had won and went on show at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
Q 27Which company's December 2001 collapse, then the largest US bankruptcy, brought down auditor Arthur Andersen?
Enron
Enron had been named America's most innovative company by Fortune six years running; then its hidden debts came to light and its shares fell from about $90 to under $1.
Q 28Which stock index lost 78% of its value between March 2000 and October 2002 as the dot-com bubble burst?
Nasdaq Composite
The Nasdaq Composite, heavy with technology shares, fell from a record close of 5,048 on 10 March 2000 and did not set a new closing high until April 2015.
Q 29The Osbournes grew out of the family's appearance on which other MTV show?
Cribs
Cribs featured the Osbournes' home in one of its first episodes, and the response led MTV to give the family a series of their own; it began in March 2002 and became the channel's most-viewed show.
Q 30The survivors in Lost, which premiered in 2004, were passengers on which fictional airline's Flight 815?
Oceanic
Oceanic Flight 815's crash made Lost's pilot one of the costliest ever filmed, at $10–14 million; ABC chairman Lloyd Braun, who had backed it, was fired before the show reached the air.