Round 1: warm-up questions almost everyone gets
Open here even with a hardcore crowd. These twelve are the shared vocabulary of forty years of gaming - the mascots, the villains and the two or three characters that non-players can still name. If you are scoring, treat this round as one point each and expect most teams to clear ten.
The useful trick with a warm-up round is to read the notes aloud after each answer. Half the room knows Sonic is Sega's, but far fewer know he exists only because Sega went hunting for something that could beat Mario, and that detail is what gets a table talking.
Q1.Who is Mario's brother?Tap to reveal
Answer: Luigi
Luigi debuted in 1983's Mario Bros. as a green palette swap - the same sprite as his brother, because the hardware allowed nothing else. The taller, thinner Luigi only arrived with the American Super Mario Bros. 2 in 1988.
Q2.Which 1981 arcade game was Mario's first appearance?Tap to reveal
Answer: Donkey Kong
He was not even called Mario yet - the climbing carpenter was labelled 'Jumpman' in the arcade cabinet's own marketing.
Q3.What colour is Kirby?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pink
He was pink in concept art before he had a name, but the Game Boy was monochrome and the American box art for Kirby's Dream Land showed him white - Sakurai has said the overseas staff simply misread the colourless sprites.
Q4.What is the full name of Sonic's two-tailed fox sidekick?Tap to reveal
Answer: Miles 'Tails' Prower
Say it out loud - Miles Prower is a pun on 'miles per hour', a joke that only works because the fox can keep up with Sonic.
Q5.Sonic's arch-enemy is called Dr. Eggman in Japan. What name did Western releases give him?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dr. Robotnik
Sega of America renamed him for the 1991 launch, and the two names ran side by side for eight years - Sonic Adventure's English script in 1999 used both, and every release after it settled on Eggman.
Q6.Sonic the Hedgehog was created to compete with which Nintendo mascot?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mario
Sega ran an internal contest for a character to front the Genesis era, and the brief was explicitly to out-cool Nintendo's plumber.
Q7.True or false: Sonic the Hedgehog is a Nintendo character.Tap to reveal
Answer: False - he belongs to Sega
The irony is that Sonic has starred in Nintendo-exclusive games since 2001, once Sega left the console hardware business entirely.
Q8.Which raccoon puts the player in debt at the start of Animal Crossing?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tom Nook
He is technically a tanuki rather than a raccoon, and his 'sell you a house first, mention the mortgage second' routine became the series' running joke.
Q9.Who is the protagonist of the Halo series?Tap to reveal
Answer: Master Chief - Master Chief Petty Officer John-117
His face has never been shown uncovered in a mainline Halo game: Halo 4's epilogue goes as far as his eyes and stops there, so the player keeps reading themselves into the armour.
Q10.What is the name of the alien alliance you fight in the first Halo?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Covenant
It is a religious alliance rather than an empire, which is why its species fight in a strict caste order rather than as one army.
Q11.What are the smallest Covenant infantry in the original Halo?Tap to reveal
Answer: Grunts
They are the comic relief and the tutorial in one - they panic and scatter when their squad leader dies, teaching players to shoot Elites first.
Q12.True or false: Captain Falcon of the F-Zero games is a space pirate.Tap to reveal
Answer: False - he is a bounty hunter
Racing is his cover story; the F-Zero manuals cast him as a bounty hunter who took up the circuit for the prize money.
Round 2: consoles, studios and release dates
This is the round that separates fans from historians. Hardware and release-year questions are the standard tiebreak in pub quizzes because they have exactly one right answer and no room for argument, which is also why you should keep them to a handful - a whole quiz of dates gets grim fast.
Two of these reward listening rather than gaming. The Commodore 64's sound chip and the Atari 2600's TIA are the reason 1980s game music sounds the way it does: composers were not writing for an orchestra, they were writing for three channels and a hardware engineer's compromise.
Q1.Which 1977 console paired its processor with a chip called the TIA, or Television Interface Adaptor, for graphics and two-channel sound?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Atari 2600
The TIA had no frame buffer, so programmers had to feed it a line at a time in sync with the electron beam - a technique the industry nicknamed 'racing the beam'.
Q2.The Commodore 64's celebrated sound chip is abbreviated SID. What does SID stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sound Interface Device
Three channels, selectable waveforms and a filter made it closer to a synthesiser than a beeper, which is why C64 tunes still get covered live.
Q3.In which year did Sonic the Hedgehog first appear?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1991
Sega bundled him with the Genesis in place of Altered Beast that year, and the console's US fortunes turned within months.
Q4.In which year was the first Final Fantasy released in Japan?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1987
Square was close enough to collapse that the title was read as a farewell - the 'final' fantasy that instead ran to a ninth numbered entry within thirteen years.
Q5.Which of these series was NOT published by Nintendo: WarioWare, Star Fox, Assassin's Creed or Super Mario Galaxy?Tap to reveal
Answer: Assassin's Creed
It is Ubisoft's, and it began life as a Prince of Persia sequel before the assassin protagonist took over the project.
Q6.Who composed the main theme of Super Mario Bros.?Tap to reveal
Answer: Koji Kondo
He wrote it to fit Mario's movement rather than the screen - Kondo revised the melody after playing the level, so the rhythm matches a running jump.
Q7.Which 2002 action-RPG came from a collaboration between Square and Disney, with a theme song called 'Hikari', released in the West as 'Simple and Clean'?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kingdom Hearts
Utada Hikaru performed both versions. The pitch reportedly happened because Square and Disney shared an office building in Tokyo.
Q8.How many King's Quest games were released during the 20th century?Tap to reveal
Answer: Eight
Roberta Williams' series ran from 1984 to King's Quest: Mask of Eternity in 1998, whose jump to 3D real-time action split the fanbase.
Q9.True or false: a Sonic the Hedgehog balloon has flown in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.Tap to reveal
Answer: True
Sonic flew in 1993 as the first video game character in the parade - and famously clipped a lamppost that year.
Q10.Which British actor voices Captain Price in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare?Tap to reveal
Answer: Billy Murray
Not Bill Murray - Billy Murray is a London actor best known for The Bill and Essex gangster films, which is exactly where Price's growl comes from.
Round 3: worlds, villains and lore
Fourteen questions on setting rather than gameplay. This is the sweet spot for a mixed room, because story details stick even for people who watched a game rather than played it - and 'which country is Resident Evil 4 set in' is answerable by anyone who has seen thirty seconds of footage.
Read these in the order given. The Resident Evil and Gears questions are recognition, the Final Fantasy and RuneScape ones need someone at the table who actually played, and the Legend of Zelda closer is the one worth saving: the answer is a piece of hardware history disguised as a lore question.
Q1.The survival horror game Resident Evil 4 takes place in which country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Spain
The game never puts the country on screen - the village signage and the Spanish the villagers shout are the giveaway, and Capcom's later material confirms rural Spain. The shift from a mansion to sunlit open country is why it reads so differently from earlier Resident Evils.
Q2.In Resident Evil 4, who is Ada Wong secretly working for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Albert Wesker
Her double-agent turn ties the game back to the first Resident Evil's traitor, which is the whole reason her mission runs parallel to Leon's.
Q3.What is the real name of the merchant who sells you weapons in Resident Evil 4?Tap to reveal
Answer: It is never given
He has no name, no backstory and no explanation for how he gets ahead of you - Capcom left him a pure piece of game design, and fans have argued about him ever since.
Q4.Who is the main character of the 2006 third-person shooter Gears of War?Tap to reveal
Answer: Marcus Fenix
The game opens with him being released from military prison, which is how it justifies handing you a soldier with nothing left to lose.
Q5.In Gears of War, COG is the acronym for which organisation?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Coalition of Ordered Governments
It is a wartime government rather than an army, and the name is the clue to the series' politics - the humans you fight for are not the good guys by default.
Q6.Which Gears of War enemy is blind, walks upright and hunts by smell?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Berserker
Because she tracks scent and sound, the fight is a stealth puzzle in the middle of a shooter - you have to make her charge into something.
Q7.In which century is the first Halo set?Tap to reveal
Answer: The 26th century
The campaign takes place in 2552, twenty-seven years into a war humanity is already losing when the player arrives.
Q8.Which Covenant troops carry arm-mounted energy shields in the original Halo?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jackals
The shield forces the player to flank rather than trade shots, one of the first Halo encounters that punishes standing still.
Q9.Who is the main villain of the game released in the United States as Final Fantasy III?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kefka
It is Final Fantasy VI everywhere else - the US numbering skipped entries that never left Japan. Kefka is also the rare Final Fantasy villain who wins in the middle of the story.
Q10.Which Final Fantasy antagonist's battle theme is 'One-Winged Angel'?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sephiroth
Uematsu set a Latin choir - sampled voices, not singers, on PlayStation hardware - against the synthesised score, the first Final Fantasy boss theme built around a choir at all.
Q11.Final Fantasy X opens in which city?Tap to reveal
Answer: Zanarkand
The opening city is a memory, not a place you can return to - the reveal reframes the hero's entire existence.
Q12.Which Sims matriarch has mysteriously vanished from her family when The Sims 2 begins?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bella Goth
She disappeared between games, and the series has been dropping hints rather than answers about it for twenty years.
Q13.What is the name of the fantasy world in which RuneScape is set?Tap to reveal
Answer: Gielinor
The name arrived years after launch, when Jagex retrofitted a coherent mythology onto a world that had grown quest by quest.
Q14.Which game was the first NES cartridge to carry a battery-backed save, because it was too long to finish in one sitting?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Legend of Zelda
The battery and its save RAM are what made that gold cartridge expensive to manufacture, and the save file is what made open-ended console adventures possible at all.
Round 4: hard mode for the die-hards
Fourteen questions you should not put in front of a casual table. Keep this round to one point each but allow team conferring, and expect a good group to land five or six. If the room is struggling, the fastest rescue is to read the note before the answer and let someone shout it out.
The Street Fighter questions here are the best value on the page, because three of them are about translation rather than fighting - Capcom's Japanese and English material disagree about what Ryu's style is called, and a mistranslated victory line invented a master who never existed, which became the most famous hoax in fighting-game history.
Q1.True or false: Ryu's master in the Street Fighter series is named Sheng Long.Tap to reveal
Answer: False - his master is Gouken
'Sheng Long' came from a mistranslated victory line, and a magazine April Fool's joke in 1992 sent players hunting a character who never existed.
Q2.Capcom USA said Ryu and Ken study Shotokan karate, but the Japanese material names a different style. What is it called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ansatsuken
It translates roughly as 'assassination fist', a much darker origin than the sport karate the Western manuals described.
Q3.Dan's fighting style in Street Fighter is Saikyo-ryu. What does the name mean in English?Tap to reveal
Answer: Strongest Style
The joke is the whole character - Dan named his own school 'the strongest' and is the weakest fighter on the roster.
Q4.What is the name of Gill's organisation in Street Fighter III?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Illuminati
Gill is the group's appointed president rather than a lone tyrant, which is why he fights you as a formality and resurrects when he loses.
Q5.Which Final Fantasy VI character is known for blitzes such as Bum Rush, Pummel and Suplex?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sabin
His blitzes are entered as controller motions, borrowed straight from fighting games - and yes, one of them lets him suplex a train.
Q6.In which Final Fantasy spin-off does every new recruit start out as a Squire or a Chemist?Tap to reveal
Answer: Final Fantasy Tactics
Every other job unlocks from those two, so the humble Chemist is the root of the entire class tree.
Q7.Which recurring Final Fantasy character, present in nearly every entry, usually provides the party's airship?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cid
He is a different man in every game - engineer, pilot, scientist - which makes him a running signature rather than a character.
Q8.What are the summoned creatures in Final Fantasy VIII called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Guardian Forces (GFs)
Junctioning them is also how you get your stats, so the game quietly punishes players who never summon at all.
Q9.In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, who was the Sith Lord before Malak?Tap to reveal
Answer: Revan
Malak's former master - and the twist the whole game is built on, since the amnesiac soldier you are playing turns out to be Revan.
Q10.Name the ancient space station where Revan finally confronts Malak.Tap to reveal
Answer: The Star Forge
It is an infinite factory powered by a star and by the dark side itself, which is why finding it is the goal of both sides.
Q11.What is the name of Pikachu's Final Smash in Super Smash Bros. Brawl?Tap to reveal
Answer: Volt Tackle
It is lifted from the Pokemon games, where Volt Tackle is the signature move a Pikachu can only learn from a Light Ball-holding parent.
Q12.Who is the final boss of the Subspace Emissary mode in Super Smash Bros. Brawl?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tabuu
Brawl's story mode was written for the game rather than assembled from existing villains, so Tabuu appears nowhere else except as a spirit to be fought in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Q13.How many characters in Super Smash Bros. Brawl have the Landmaster as their Final Smash?Tap to reveal
Answer: Three - Fox, Falco and Wolf
All three come from Star Fox, and giving them the same tank became a long-running complaint - Fox and Falco kept it through Smash for Wii U, and Sakurai finally retired it in Ultimate.
Q14.Which cheat code gives you 50,000 simoleons in The Sims 2?Tap to reveal
Answer: motherlode
Its smaller sibling 'kaching' pays out only 1,000, which is why the bigger code is the one everyone still remembers typing.
Round 5: the movie lines hidden in Warcraft III
Here is a round nobody else at your trivia night will have. In Warcraft III, clicking the same unit repeatedly makes it break character, and Blizzard filled those responses with film quotes. So this is a crossover round: read the unit and the line, and the table has to name the movie it came from.
It plays beautifully with a mixed-age crowd, because the games knowledge and the film knowledge sit in different people. Award the point to whoever shouts first, and if a table is stuck, name the year - most of these come from films between 1967 and 1999.
Q1.A Warcraft III Bandit says: 'What we have here is a failure to communicate.' Which film is that from?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Spoken by the prison captain to Paul Newman's Luke - the American Film Institute ranks it among the most memorable movie lines ever written.
Q2.A Rifleman says: 'This... is... my... BOOMSTICK!' Which film is that from?Tap to reveal
Answer: Army of Darkness (1992)
Bruce Campbell's Ash sells a shotgun to medieval villagers, and Sam Raimi's horror-comedy has been quoted in games ever since.
Q3.A Head Hunter says: 'Say hello to my little friend.' Which film is that from?Tap to reveal
Answer: Scarface (1983)
Al Pacino's Tony Montana says it with a grenade-launcher-equipped rifle, which is why the line is always delivered by something heavily armed.
Q4.A Far Seer says: 'I see dead people.' Which film is that from?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Sixth Sense (1999)
Haley Joel Osment's whispered line became shorthand for the twist ending, and Warcraft III shipped close enough to the film to make it topical.
Q5.A Knight says: 'My favourite colour is blue. NO! Yellow!' Which film is that from?Tap to reveal
Answer: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
It is the Bridge of Death scene, where changing your answer gets you flung into the gorge - a fitting joke for a unit taking orders.
Q6.A Dragonhawk Rider says: 'Permission to buzz the tower.' Which film is that from?Tap to reveal
Answer: Top Gun (1986)
Blizzard called the dragonhawks 'wind serpents' during development, and The Frozen Throne kept the Top Gun joke in the rider's annoyed lines - the next one is 'I'll hit the brakes, he'll fly right by.'
Q7.A Huntress says: 'This is my owl. There are many like it, but this one is mine.' Which film is that from?Tap to reveal
Answer: Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The original is the Rifleman's Creed, recited in Kubrick's boot camp - swap 'rifle' for 'owl' and you have the joke.
Hosting a video game trivia night
Split your rounds by era rather than by genre. A room of adults splits cleanly into people who grew up with the NES and Genesis, people who grew up with the PlayStation 2, and people who started on phones - mixed teams beat solo experts every time, so seed the teams deliberately.
Two practical rules. Announce before round one whether you are accepting Japanese or Western names, because Robotnik and Eggman are the same villain and Final Fantasy's US numbering will otherwise cost you ten minutes of argument. And never build a round on a sound clip unless you have tested the speakers - half the good video game trivia in the world is music, and none of it survives a bad room.
Trivio.NET has video game quiz packs you can play head-to-head instead of reading questions aloud. Free in the app.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many questions do I need for a video game trivia night?
Between 40 and 60 for a full evening. Five rounds of ten to twelve questions, with a short break between rounds, runs about ninety minutes including scoring and arguments.
How do I keep video game trivia fair across different ages?
Balance each round across eras instead of putting all the retro questions together. A round that is entirely 1990s hands the game to one table; a round that mixes Mario, Halo and Animal Crossing keeps everyone scoring.
Should I accept Japanese or Western character names as answers?
Decide before you start and say so. Robotnik and Eggman, Final Fantasy VI and the US Final Fantasy III, Ansatsuken and Shotokan - each pair is one thing with two official names, so either accept both or pick one region and stick to it.
What makes a good hard round without killing the mood?
Ask about things players saw rather than things they memorised. 'Whose theme is One-Winged Angel' is hard but recallable; 'what is the damage value of the Broken Butterfly' is only lookup-able, and a table that cannot even guess stops playing.
Are questions about very old games still worth asking?
Yes, if the fact has not moved. Release years, hardware and character names hold up; anything about record sales, current player counts or the most powerful weapon in a live-service game goes stale, because the game keeps being patched after your quiz.
Where can I find more video game trivia to play?
Trivio.NET's Video Games category has packs by franchise and by console generation, and you can play them against other people rather than reading questions aloud.
