Classic Video Game Trivia

Before online multiplayer and photorealistic graphics, gaming history was built on quarters, cartridges, and a handful of characters who became more recognizable than most movie stars. This quiz travels back through the arcades and living rooms that shaped the industry.

Eight questions cover the mascots, milestones, and genre-defining moments that turned video games from a novelty into a global habit.

From Coin Slots to Consoles

The earliest video games lived in arcades, where a single quarter bought a few minutes of someone's undivided attention. As home consoles caught up, cartridges brought that same experience into living rooms, and gaming stopped being something you did on an outing and became something you did every day.

The Characters That Became Icons

A handful of characters from this era are recognizable even to people who've never picked up a controller. A mustached plumber, a blue hedgehog, and a green-clad adventurer all became shorthand for entire consoles and companies, outliving the hardware they were built to sell.

Genres Still Being Copied Today

Plenty of formats we now take for granted — the falling-block puzzle, the platformer, the open-world adventure — were invented or perfected during this era of gaming, and modern hits are still riffing on templates set decades ago.

• Puzzle games trace back to a deceptively simple falling-block format.
• Platformers turned running and jumping into an entire genre.
• Competitive last-player-standing formats exploded into a modern genre of their own.
• Mascot characters became marketing tools as much as game protagonists.