2023 Video Game Trivia
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60 free 2023 Video Game trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
2023 was one of the strongest years in video game history: 25 games scored 90 or better on Metacritic by October, the most since 2004. This quiz covers the whole year, from the January surprise release of Hi-Fi Rush to the December trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, with the big releases in between: Baldur's Gate 3, Tears of the Kingdom, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Alan Wake 2, Starfield, Hogwarts Legacy, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Street Fighter 6, Diablo IV, Final Fantasy XVI and the Resident Evil 4 remake. It also covers the year's business and drama: Microsoft closing its $75 billion Activision Blizzard deal, Unity's runtime-fee revolt, the cancellation of E3, The Day Before vanishing four days after launch, the Redfall flop, the industry's 9,000 layoffs, and the winners at The Game Awards. Questions start easy (who won Game of the Year, who voices Bowser in the Mario movie) and get properly hard (what Microsoft gave Ubisoft, how many planets Starfield claims, which studio made Cocoon). Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on the games, studios and events, and each question shows its source once you have answered. Share your score, then try the general video game quiz for the retro and modern classics that came before.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which game won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2023?
Baldur's Gate 3
Baldur's Gate 3 later became the first game to win the top prize at all five major award shows. Its PC launch had been pulled forward four weeks, clear of an autumn crowded by Starfield.
Q 02Which Belgian developer adapted Dungeons & Dragons' fifth edition into a hit 2023 role-playing game?
Larian Studios
Larian Studios was first told by Wizards of the Coast that it was 'a bit too green'. After Wizards saw footage of Divinity: Original Sin II, it came back and asked if the studio was still interested.
Q 03Neil Newbon won Best Performance at The Game Awards 2023 for voicing which vampire-spawn rogue?
Astarion
Astarion's win ended awkwardly: the play-off music cut Newbon off while he was describing players' heartfelt responses to the character.
Q 04Which die settles most attacks and dialogue checks in 2023's hit Dungeons & Dragons role-playing video game?
A 20-sided die
A 20-sided die decides it, but a default setting called karmic dice quietly nudges the rolls so that bad luck doesn't run in long streaks.
Q 05Which 2023 Remedy Entertainment horror sequel won Best Narrative and Best Art Direction at The Game Awards?
Alan Wake 2
Alan Wake 2 took 13 years to arrive: Remedy pitched a sequel early on, but its talks with Microsoft turned into Quantum Break instead.
Q 06Which company funded Remedy Entertainment's 2023 horror sequel, keeping its PC version off Steam?
Epic Games Publishing
Epic Games Publishing signed Remedy in March 2020 on terms that covered development costs and split profits 50/50, so the PC version launched only on Epic's own store.
Q 07Which kind of new playable lead joins the trapped novelist in Remedy Entertainment's 2023 horror sequel?
An FBI agent
An FBI agent was added for newcomers: 13 years after the first game, the writers didn't want anyone to need homework, so her murder case gives first-time players their own way in.
Q 08Which villain awakens as a mummified corpse beneath Hyrule Castle at the start of Tears of the Kingdom?
Ganondorf
Ganondorf is held down by a glowing severed arm; once it lets go he shatters the Master Sword and ruins Link's arm, and that same arm becomes Link's replacement.
Q 09Tears of the Kingdom added islands in the sky and a vast underground region beneath Hyrule called what?
The Depths
The Depths mirror the surface above: each Lightroot sits beneath a shrine and carries that shrine's name spelled backwards, so finding one pinpoints the other.
Q 10Which Tears of the Kingdom ability lets Link stick objects together to build vehicles?
Ultrahand
Ultrahand exists because of fans: after watching players post videos of wild experiments in the previous game, the developers built tools that reward tinkering.
Q 11Which ancient people built the floating ruins, shrines and devices of Tears of the Kingdom?
The Zonai
The Zonai were little more than a name on some ruins in Breath of the Wild; the sequel reveals them as Hyrule's founders, come down from the sky, with Rauru as its first king.
Q 12Which Warner Bros. studio, once the maker of Disney Infinity, developed Hogwarts Legacy?
Avalanche Software
Avalanche Software came back from the dead: Disney shut it in May 2016 after cancelling Disney Infinity, and Warner Bros. bought and reopened it in January 2017.
Q 13Ranrok leads a rebellion of which magical creatures in Hogwarts Legacy, set in the 1890s?
Goblins
Q 21A new fruit power-up in Super Mario Bros. Wonder transforms Mario into which animal?
An elephant
The other new power-ups are a bubble flower and a drill mushroom. Wonder Flowers trigger effects like pipes coming to life mid-level.
Q 22Who voiced Bowser in The Super Mario Bros Movie, released in April 2023?
Jack Black
Jack Black also sang Bowser's piano ballad "Peaches" in the film, and it reached the Billboard Hot 100, his first solo entry on that chart.
Q 23Which animation studio made The Super Mario Bros Movie with Nintendo, the first video game film to gross $1 billion?
Illumination
Illumination got the job through theme parks: Shigeru Miyamoto met its boss Chris Meledandri via Universal's park work with Nintendo, decades after the 1993 live-action film flopped.
Goblins supply the villain of a story set in the 1890s on purpose: the writers wanted players far enough from Harry Potter's era that Voldemort could never turn up.
Q 14Hogwarts Legacy was 2023's best-selling US game, ending a 14-year streak shared by Rockstar titles and which series?
Call of Duty
Call of Duty or a Rockstar game had topped every US year since 2009; this time Modern Warfare III, released nine months after the wizarding game, had to settle for second.
Q 15Todd Howard described Starfield, Bethesda's first new IP in 25 years, with which three-word phrase?
Skyrim in space
"Skyrim in space" ended a long wait for Howard: in the 2000s, when Bethesda held the Star Trek licence, he pitched a Star Trek role-playing game that never got made.
Q 16About how many planets did Bethesda say players could land on in Starfield?
1,000
More than 1,000 planets is only possible because most are assembled on the fly: the game stitches blocks of terrain together as a ship approaches, then places handcrafted locations on top.
Q 17Starfield launched on September 6, 2023, for Windows and which console family only?
Xbox Series X/S
Xbox Series X/S was the only console at launch because Microsoft had finished buying Bethesda's parent, ZeniMax, in 2021. A PlayStation 5 version did not arrive until April 2026.
Q 18Marvel's Spider-Man 2 pits Peter Parker and Miles Morales against Kraven and which alien symbiote?
Venom
Venom's host here is not Eddie Brock: the game's creative director said the aim was an original story, one players had not yet seen in the comics or the films.
Q 19Which PlayStation studio, also behind Ratchet & Clank, developed Marvel's Spider-Man 2?
Insomniac Games
Insomniac Games was hacked by a ransomware gang weeks after launch; when no ransom came, 1.67 terabytes of files spilled out, including the studio's release plans for the next 12 years.
Q 20In Super Mario Bros Wonder, Bowser fuses himself with the castle of which new land?
The Flower Kingdom
The Flower Kingdom's chatty Talking Flowers were a late swap: Nintendo spent about six months building sports-style live commentary on the player's moves, then dropped it.
Q 24Which publisher did Microsoft finish acquiring in October 2023, in what was then gaming's biggest-ever takeover?
Activision Blizzard
Activision Blizzard agreed a $68.7 billion sale that took nearly two years of regulator battles; just over three months after closing, Microsoft cut 1,900 gaming jobs, many of them at its new purchase.
Q 25Which company bought cloud-streaming rights to the games in Microsoft's $68.7 billion 2023 takeover, winning over the UK regulator?
Ubisoft
Ubisoft got the streaming rights to 15 years of the publisher's games after the UK regulator blocked the first deal in April 2023 over cloud gaming; the narrower version was cleared that October.
Q 26Which US agency went to court in 2023 to block Microsoft's $68.7 billion gaming takeover, and lost?
The Federal Trade Commission
The Federal Trade Commission lost when a judge found the evidence pointed to more access to the games, not less; it lost an appeal too and dropped the case in May 2025.
Q 27What is the Florida-based fictional state revealed in the first Grand Theft Auto VI trailer called?
Leonida
Leonida's reveal came early: a low-quality copy of the trailer leaked online, so Rockstar published the official version ahead of schedule.
Q 28The first Grand Theft Auto VI trailer introduced a criminal duo modelled on which real-life outlaw pair?
Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde inspired Lucia and Jason, partners in love and crime; the trailer also sent Spotify streams of its Tom Petty song, Love Is a Long Road, up nearly 37,000 percent.
Q 29Street Fighter 6's main new mechanic, a meter that can be spent on five different techniques, is called what?
The Drive Gauge
The Drive Gauge is full from the start of each round, but spend it all and the fighter enters Burnout: it refills on its own while blocking weakens, so managing it decides matches.
Q 30In the 2023 Resident Evil 4 remake, Leon rescues the president's daughter from a cult in which country?
Spain
Spain's cult plot began as a rush job: the original game's director says he wrote the story in two or three weeks, and he praised the remake for fleshing out his hurried work.