50 free Retro trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Slinky inventor Richard James's job when he saw a spring 'walk' off a shelf in 1943?
Naval engineer
His wife Betty picked the name, and about 300 million were sold in the toy's first 60 years.
Q 02How long did it take the first 400 Slinkys to sell at their 1945 Philadelphia department store debut?
90 minutes
The toy later did duty as a classroom physics prop and as an improvised radio antenna in Vietnam.
Q 03The Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by a Hungarian sculptor and professor of what?
Architecture
It was originally called the Magic Cube and was licensed to Ideal Toy Corp in 1980.
Q 04Roughly how many Rubik's Cubes had been sold worldwide as of January 2024?
500 million
The cube has about 43 quintillion possible arrangements and only one solved state.
Q 05What did French electrician André Cassagnes originally call the Etch A Sketch?
L'Écran Magique
The name means 'the magic screen'; the Ohio Art Company launched it in the US for Christmas 1960.
Q 06The inside of an Etch A Sketch screen is coated with a fine powder of which metal?
Aluminium
Shaking the toy re-coats the glass; it entered the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998.
Q 07The View-Master, whose reels hold seven stereoscopic pairs of pictures, was introduced at which event?
The 1939 New York World's Fair
The US military bought 100,000 viewers and nearly six million reels for training between 1942 and 1945.
Q 08Wham-O's plastic hula hoop went on sale in 1958 and sold how many in under four months?
25 million
Sales passed 100 million within two years; the name came from the Hawaiian hula dance.
Q 09The Pet Rock was created in 1975 by Gary Dahl, who worked in what industry?
Advertising
He sold nearly 1.5 million at just under $4 each and became a millionaire before the fad died in early 1976.
Q 10The mood ring craze of 1975 relied on which technology to change colour with skin temperature?
Thermotropic liquid crystals
By December 1975 some $15 million of rings had been sold, and then the market collapsed within weeks.
Q 11Edward Craven Walker invented the lava lamp in 1963 after seeing an egg timer bubbling where?
On a pub stove
His first model was called the Astro, and his company Mathmos still makes them in Poole, Dorset.
Q 12The Simon memory game was launched in 1978 at which famous New York nightclub?
Studio 54
Ralph Baer and Howard Morrison based it on Atari's arcade game Touch Me, and it retailed for $24.95.
Q 13Under what name did Xavier Roberts originally sell the dolls that became Cabbage Patch Kids?
Little People
The name had to change because Fisher-Price already owned it; Coleco began mass-producing the dolls in 1982.
Q 21The first floppy disks, made by IBM in 1971, were how big across?
8 inches
The 1.44 MB 3.5-inch disk that became standard shipped in 1986, and its shape survives as the 'save' icon.
Q 22Which company, in floppies since 1983, sold its last 3.5-inch disks in March 2011?
Sony
By then the disks were mostly a skeuomorph in software menus rather than a storage medium.
Q 23Push-button Touch-Tone telephones were first shown to the public at which event?
The 1962 Seattle World's Fair
The rotary dial lives on in the verb 'to dial' a number.
Q 14How many Cabbage Patch Kids did Coleco ship in 1983, the year of the Christmas 'riots' in toy stores?
3.3 million
The company pulled all its promotion because it could not keep up with demand.
Q 15The Tamagotchi's name is a portmanteau of the Japanese word for 'watch' and the Japanese word for what?
Egg
Bandai released it in Japan on November 23, 1996, and many schools banned it for distracting pupils.
Q 16The 1990s Pogs craze took its name from POG, a brand of what?
Fruit juice
The letters stood for passionfruit, orange and guava; a Hawaiian teacher revived the milk-cap game for her class in 1991.
Q 17Stuart Anders, who invented the slap bracelet in 1983, worked as what in Wisconsin?
Teacher
Cheap knock-offs with thinner steel could cut wrists, and many schools banned them.
Q 18The Sony Walkman went on sale in Japan in July 1979. What was it initially called in the United States?
Soundabout
It was the Stowaway in Britain and the Freestyle in Australia and Sweden before Sony standardised the name; 'Walkman' entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1986.
Q 19Sony's Betamax lost the format war to VHS, yet Sony kept making blank Beta cassettes until when?
2016
The recorders themselves stayed in production until August 2002.
Q 20The 8-track cartridge was created in 1965 by a consortium led by the founder of which aviation company?
Lear Jet
Ford offered factory-installed players on the 1966 Mustang, Thunderbird and Lincoln, and the endless-loop tape could not be rewound.
Q 24The first telephone pager system was patented in 1949 by which inventor?
Al Gross
The Bell System showed its Bellboy pager at a 1960s world's fair, and Japan's last paging service shut down in October 2019.
Q 25What did Polaroid's SX-70 folding instant camera cost when Edwin Land unveiled it in April 1972?
$180
Film packs of ten cost $6.90 more, yet Polaroid still sold 700,000 cameras by mid-1974.
Q 26The 2600 console was released in 1977 under what original name?
Atari Video Computer System
It was rebranded the 2600 in November 1982, and the 1980 home port of Space Invaders was its killer app.
Q 27In which state did Atari bury 14 truckloads of unsold cartridges, including E.T., in 1983?
New Mexico
A 2014 excavation dug up roughly 700,000 cartridges and confirmed the long-rumoured burial.
Q 28Pong, the first commercially successful video game, was created in 1972 by Allan Alcorn as what?
A training exercise
The prototype went into Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, and Sears sold the home version exclusively for Christmas 1975.
Q 29What was Pac-Man originally called in Japan?
Puck Man
Namco released it in Japan on May 22, 1980, and it became the best-selling arcade game of all time.
Q 30What are the four ghosts in Pac-Man called?
Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde
The colours are red, pink, cyan and orange, and each has its own chasing behaviour.