50 free Sony trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Sony trivia for gadget lovers, PlayStation players and anyone who once carried a Walkman on the bus. The quiz starts in a bombed-out Tokyo department store in 1946, where Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo with eight employees, built Japan's first tape recorder, and eventually chose a four-letter brand name from a Latin word and an American slang term, over the objections of their bank. Then it follows the products that made the brand: the TR-55 and TR-63 transistor radios, Trinitron, U-matic and the Betamax defeat, the 1979 Walkman, the compact disc with Philips, the 3.5-inch floppy, MiniDisc, Memory Stick and Blu-ray. Later rounds cover the media empire built by Norio Ohga, from CBS Records and Columbia Pictures to Spider-Man and Jeopardy!, the Nintendo partnership that collapsed into the PlayStation, the record-selling PS2, the first foreign CEO, the 2005 rootkit scandal, the 2014 hack over The Interview, Aibo the robot dog and the Afeela electric car. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our PlayStation, Nintendo, Japan and technology quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which two men founded the company that became Sony in 1946?
Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita
Ibuka opened an electronics shop in a Tokyo department store; Morita joined him on 7 May 1946.
Q 02What did the company's original Japanese name mean in English?
Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation
It began with capital of ¥190,000 and eight employees.
Q 03What was the company's early product called the Type-G?
Japan's earliest tape recorder
The founders realised early they needed a short brand name to sell abroad.
Q 04Why did the founders reject the initials TTK as a brand name?
A railway company was already known as TTK
'Totsuko' and 'Tokyo Teletech' were also tried and dropped.
Q 05The name Sony combines the Latin 'sonus' with which American slang word?
Sonny
In 1950s Japan 'sonny boys' meant smart, presentable young men, which the founders reckoned they were.
Q 06Which bank pushed for a longer name such as 'Sony Electronic Industries' when the company renamed itself in 1958?
Mitsui
Morita refused to tie the name to any one industry, and won.
Q 07What was the first Sony-branded product, released in 1955?
The TR-55 transistor radio
The company itself did not take the Sony name until January 1958.
Q 08Which Sony radio is credited with 'cracking open the U.S. market' for consumer microelectronics?
The TR-63
American teens bought portable transistor radios by the million in the late 1950s and 1960s.
Q 09In which year did Sony release the Walkman, the world's first portable music player?
1979
It came bundled with MDL-3L2 headphones; a 1979 TPS-L2 model was shown at MoMA in 2025.
Q 10Sony's proprietary colour television technology, patented until 1996, was called what?
Trinitron
Triluminos followed in 2004 in the world's first LED-backlit LCD TVs.
Q 11Sony's U-matic of 1971 was the world's first what?
Videocassette format
It was too expensive for homes, so Betamax followed in 1975.
Q 12Sony's Betamax lost the videotape format war to VHS, which was developed by which company?
JVC
The professional Betacam derivative survived until Sony stopped making the decks in 2016.
Q 13Sony launched its Handycam camcorders in 1985 alongside which tape format?
Video8
The follow-on Hi8 also did well in the consumer camcorder market.
Q 14With which company did Sony jointly announce the Compact Disc in 1983?
Q 21Which Nintendo console did Sony supply the sound chip for?
Super Famicom
The two companies also worked on a CD-ROM add-on until Nintendo walked away in 1991.
Q 22Which company did Nintendo choose over Sony for its CD-ROM add-on, a day after Sony's 1991 reveal?
Philips
The snub infuriated Sony president Norio Ohga, who put Ken Kutaragi in charge of building a Sony console.
Q 23Who is the Sony engineer credited with developing the PlayStation?
Ken Kutaragi
He faced strong opposition from older Sony executives who did not want the company in games.
Philips
The Discman portable CD player followed in 1984.
Q 15Sony introduced which floppy disk size in 1983, going on to dominate the market?
3.5-inch
It still held over 70 percent of the market when it stopped making them in 2010.
Q 16Which recordable disc format did Sony launch in 1992 as a successor to the cassette?
MiniDisc
Sony pushed its ATRAC compression against MP3, which its Network Walkmans did not support until late 2004.
Q 17Sony's SDDS cinema sound format of 1993 used how many audio channels?
Eight
It lost out to Dolby Digital and DTS and was never made for home theatres.
Q 18Which flash card format did Sony launch in 1998?
Memory Stick
It saw little support outside Sony's own products as SD cards took over.
Q 19Blu-ray, which Sony helped develop, beat which rival high-definition disc format?
HD DVD
The two-year format war ended in Blu-ray's favour; PS3 was the first console to use it.
Q 20Sony's contactless IC card technology, used for payments and transit, is called what?
FeliCa
It grew out of NFC work with Philips.
Q 24In which year did the first PlayStation launch?
1994
It took 61 percent of global console sales and ended Nintendo's long lead.
Q 25How many units had the PlayStation 2, the best-selling console of all time, sold as of 2011?
Over 150 million
It launched in 2000; the PS3 followed in 2006 with a costly Cell processor.
Q 26Which optical format did Sony create for the PlayStation Portable?
Universal Media Disc
Movies were released on it early on, but studios soon lost interest.
Q 27Sony's virtual reality headset for PS4 was originally revealed in 2014 under what code name?
Project Morpheus
PlayStation VR shipped worldwide on 13 October 2016.
Q 28Which record company did Sony buy in 1988 for about $2 billion?
CBS Records
It became the foundation of Sony Music Entertainment in 1991.
Q 29Which Hollywood studio did Sony buy in 1989 for $3.4 billion?
Columbia Pictures
TriStar and Screen Gems came with it; the studio struggled for years afterwards.
Q 30Which Sony president drove the CD, the PlayStation and the CBS and Columbia purchases?
Norio Ohga
He succeeded Morita as chief executive in 1989.