Retro Trivia
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100 free Retro trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
44 free Retro trivia questions with answers. Retro trivia is not about one decade. It is the drawer full of things that used to be everywhere: the Slinky that sold 400 units in 90 minutes at a Philadelphia department store, the Rubik's Cube that started life as the Magic Cube, the Atari cartridges buried in a New Mexico landfill, the Walkman that had to be sold as the Soundabout in America, and the pet rock that made an advertising man a millionaire in a single Christmas. This quiz runs 100 questions across toys, gadgets, snacks, cars, arcades and fads from the 1950s through the 1990s: hula hoops and mood rings, Etch A Sketch and Simon, 8-tracks and floppy disks, TV dinners and Tang, New Coke and Crystal Pepsi, Pong, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, the DeLorean and the Beetle, Pogs, slap bracelets, Tamagotchis and Cabbage Patch riots. It starts easy and ends with questions for people who remember which department store demonstrated the first Slinky. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedia entry on the product, and each question shows its source once you have answered, so it works for a themed party, a family gathering that spans generations, or a nostalgia round at the pub.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Richard James's job in 1943 when a fallen spring's 'walk' gave him the idea for the Slinky?
Naval engineer
Naval engineer Richard James was working on springs to steady ship instruments at sea when one fell and kept moving. His wife Betty found the name Slinky in a dictionary.
Q 02How long did it take the first 400 Slinkys to sell at their 1945 Philadelphia department store debut?
90 minutes
90 minutes was all it took once the Jameses demonstrated the toy on a ramp at Gimbels in the 1945 Christmas shopping season. Each Slinky cost a dollar.
Q 03The Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by a Hungarian sculptor and professor of what?
Architecture
Architecture was Ernő Rubik's subject at a Budapest design academy when he built the first cube in 1974. He called it the Magic Cube until Ideal Toy renamed it after him in 1980.
Q 04How long did it take Ernő Rubik to first solve his own cube?
A month
A month of trial and error is what it took him, and at first he wasn't sure it could be solved at all. The cube has more than 43 quintillion possible arrangements.
Q 05French electrician André Cassagnes first gave the Etch A Sketch a name meaning what?
The magic screen
The magic screen, or L'Écran Magique, drew little interest at the 1959 Nuremberg toy fair, and Ohio Art passed on it at first. As Etch A Sketch it became the must-have toy of Christmas 1960.
Q 06The inside of an Etch A Sketch screen is coated with a fine powder of which metal?
Aluminium
Aluminium powder clings to the inside of the screen by static, and the stylus scrapes a dark line through it. Shaking the toy lets tiny plastic beads spread the powder back again.
Q 07Which 3-D picture gadget, fed with round cardboard reels, made its debut at the 1939 New York World's Fair?
View-Master
View-Master began as a souvenir, sold through photography shops with reels of scenic sights. It turned into a toy after buying rival Tru-Vue in 1951, which brought the 3-D rights to Disney characters.
Q 08Which Wham-O toy was the fad of 1958, selling about 25 million within four months?
Hula hoop
Hula hoop mania began after Wham-O's founders heard of Australians twirling hoops round their waists. The plastic ring takes its name from the Hawaiian dance its users seem to copy.
Q 09The 1975 Pet Rock came with a jokey training manual by creator Gary Dahl, who worked in which industry?
Advertising
Advertising copywriter Gary Dahl wrote it as a spoof of pet-training guides, with tips on getting a rock to play dead. He sold more than a million at $3.95 each within a few months.
Q 10What did the mood rings of the 1975 craze actually respond to when they changed colour?
Skin temperature
Skin temperature is all a mood ring reads: its liquid crystals twist as they warm and reflect a different colour. Josh Reynolds and Maris Ambats put theirs in American shops in 1975.
Q 11Edward Craven Walker invented the lava lamp in 1963 after seeing an egg timer bubbling where?
On a pub stove
On a pub stove he spotted a homemade egg timer made from a cocktail shaker and set out to perfect it as a lamp. He settled on an orange squash bottle to hold the wax.
Q 12The Simon memory game was launched in 1978 at which famous New York nightclub?
Studio 54
Milton Bradley launched Simon with a party at Studio 54 in 1978; Ralph Baer and Howard Morrison based it on Atari's arcade game Touch Me.
Q 13Which 1980s doll craze began as 'Little People', soft-sculpture babies Xavier Roberts offered for adoption?
Cabbage Patch Kids
Q 21IBM's first floppy disk, an 8-inch platter of 1971, held as much data as 3,000 of what?
Punched cards
Punched cards were still how many firms fed data to computers, so IBM adapted its card machines to write to disks instead. That first floppy held about 80 kilobytes and could only be read.
Q 22Which company, which devised the 3.5-inch floppy disk, stopped making them only in March 2011?
Sony
Sony had nearly three decades in the business, and millions of floppies were still being bought every year when it called time. The disk lives on as the save icon in software menus.
Q 23Touch-Tone phones gained their star and hash keys only in 1968, so what were the two keys for?
Advanced services
Cabbage Patch Kids was the name licensing agent Roger Schlaifer gave the dolls in 1982. Roberts had offered his originals from a mock hospital with staff in medical uniforms, each doll with a birth certificate and adoption papers.
Q 14The Magic 8 Ball's inventor took the idea from his mother, who worked as what?
Clairvoyant
A clairvoyant who claimed to talk with ghosts, she inspired a fortune-telling tube that sold poorly, even inside a crystal ball. It took off only after Brunswick Billiards ordered one shaped like an 8-ball in 1950.
Q 15The Tamagotchi's name is a portmanteau of the Japanese word for 'watch' and the Japanese word for what?
Egg
Egg is tamago in Japanese, which Bandai joined to uotchi, its spelling of 'watch'. The pet was first planned as a wristwatch, then became a keychain before its 1996 launch.
Q 16The 1990s Pogs craze took its name from POG, a Hawaiian brand of what?
Fruit juice
Fruit juice blended from passion fruit, orange and guava gave POG its letters, and Haleakala Dairy printed the name on its caps. Oahu educator Blossom Galbiso revived the old milk-cap game in 1991.
Q 17Stuart Anders, whose slap bracelet many schools later banned, had which job in Wisconsin?
Teacher
Teacher Stuart Anders taught high-school shop classes and came up with the steel band in 1983. Cheap knock-offs with sharp edges later cut children, which is what got the craze banned.
Q 18Which Sony gadget of 1979 was first sold in America as the Soundabout and in Britain as the Stowaway?
Walkman
Walkman was a play on the Pressman, the reporters' recorder its prototype was built from. Sony's overseas offices doubted the name, but it had already caught on abroad, and it reached the Oxford English Dictionary in 1986.
Q 19Sony's Betamax launched a year before VHS, so which advantage helped VHS win the format war?
Longer recording time
Longer recording time was a big part of it: early VHS tapes ran two hours, enough for a film, while Sony's smaller Beta cassettes lasted one. Sony still went on selling blank Beta tapes until March 2016.
Q 20The 8-track cartridge was created in 1965 by a consortium led by the founder of which business-aircraft maker?
Lear Jet
Lear Jet founder Bill Lear had form with sound on the road: decades earlier he helped develop an early car radio, the product that gave Motorola its name.
Advanced services were the plan: AT&T added the two keys with future uses in mind, such as business data entry, not for dialling. Early Touch-Tone sets had stopped at the ten digits.
Q 24Al Gross patented the first telephone pager in 1949 for which group, who were wary of it at first?
Doctors
Doctors at a 1949 medical convention feared the device would upset their patients, but New York medics were using pagers by the next year. Gross had already built an early walkie-talkie.
Q 25Polaroid's SX-70 of 1972 spared instant-camera users which chore with every picture?
Peeling it apart
Peeling it apart was the old routine: earlier Polaroids made you time a minute, split the print and risk chemicals on your fingers. The folding SX-70 pushed out a picture that developed in daylight, at a steep $180.
Q 26Which console went on sale in 1977 as the Video Computer System, or VCS, and took its famous name only in 1982?
Atari 2600
Atari 2600 became the console's name only once the newer 5200 arrived. Its sales had taken off in 1980, when a home version of Space Invaders gave players a reason to buy one.
Q 27In which state did Atari bury truckloads of unsold cartridges, including E.T., in 1983?
New Mexico
New Mexico's Alamogordo landfill kept its secret for 30 years, and many wrote the story off as an urban myth. A 2014 dig for a documentary turned up copies of E.T. and proved it true.
Q 28What stopped Atari's first Pong machine working soon after it reached a California bar in 1972?
A full coin box
A full coin box was the fault: players at Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale had jammed it with quarters. Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell had handed the project to engineer Allan Alcorn only months before.
Q 29What was Pac-Man originally called in Japan?
Puck Man
Puck Man echoed 'paku paku', the Japanese sound of gobbling, when the game reached a Tokyo arcade in May 1980. For America it became Pac-Man, for fear that vandals would turn the P into an F.
Q 30Three of Pac-Man's four ghosts are Blinky, Pinky and Inky, so what is the fourth one called?
Clyde
Clyde is the odd one out, the only ghost whose name breaks the rhyme. Designer Toru Iwatani gave each of the four its own personality, so they hunt Pac-Man in different ways.