Quick answer: Sixty video game trivia questions with answers, in six rounds of ten: Nintendo, arcade classics, consoles, famous characters, modern hits and a hard round to finish. Every answer comes with one extra fact for the host to read out.
A video game round splits a room in a useful way. The people who grew up with a Game Boy finally get their moment, and everyone else is surprised how much they know, because Mario, Pac-Man and Tetris have been part of ordinary life for forty years.
These sixty run from easy to hard inside each round, and they lean on the history and the characters rather than on sales charts and esports results, which change too fast to quiz on. Read them out as they are, or take your favourite ten for a single mixed round.
How to use these: one games round per night is plenty. Put it after the general knowledge rounds, when the room is warm and the younger players are getting restless. If you only need ten questions, take two from each of the first five rounds.
Round one: Nintendo
1. What was Mario called in his first game, Donkey Kong (1981)?
Jumpman. He was a carpenter then, and only became a plumber later.
2. What is the name of the hero in The Legend of Zelda?
Link. Zelda is the princess, which is the most common mix-up in all of gaming.
3. Who is Mario's younger brother?
Luigi.
4. What is the name of the green dinosaur Mario rides?
Yoshi.
5. Which Pokémon is number one in the original Pokédex?
Bulbasaur.
6. Which Pokémon follows Ash Ketchum everywhere in the cartoon?
Pikachu.
7. Which game came bundled with the Game Boy in North America and Europe in 1989?
Tetris, which did more to sell the console than any advert.
8. Which 2006 Nintendo console was built around motion controls?
The Wii.
9. What did Nintendo make when it was founded in 1889?
Playing cards, the Japanese hanafuda kind, in Kyoto.
10. Who is Mario's turtle-like arch-enemy?
Bowser, King of the Koopas.
Round two: arcade classics
11. What are the names of the four ghosts in Pac-Man?
Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. Each one chases Pac-Man in a different way.
12. What food inspired Pac-Man's shape?
A pizza with one slice missing, according to his creator Toru Iwatani.
13. Which 1972 table tennis game was Atari's first big hit?
Pong.
14. Which 1978 arcade game sends rows of aliens marching down the screen?
Space Invaders.
15. In which country was Tetris created?
The Soviet Union, by Alexey Pajitnov in Moscow in 1984.
16. How many squares make up each Tetris piece?
Four, which is where the name comes from: tetra, the Greek for four.
17. What is the Konami Code?
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. It first appeared in Gradius, where it handed you every power-up, and became famous in Contra, where it gave you thirty lives.
18. What is the frog trying to do in Frogger?
Cross a busy road and then a river full of logs and turtles to get home.
19. What did the name Sega originally stand for?
Service Games.
20. Which ape throws barrels at Mario?
Donkey Kong.
Round three: consoles and controllers
21. Which company makes the PlayStation?
Sony.
22. In which year did the first PlayStation go on sale in Japan?
1994.
23. Which company makes the Xbox?
Microsoft.
24. On which Sega console did Sonic the Hedgehog first appear in 1991?
The Mega Drive, sold as the Genesis in North America.
25. Why is Sonic blue?
To match Sega's blue logo.
26. What was the Nintendo Entertainment System called in Japan?
The Famicom, short for Family Computer.
27. What does NES stand for?
Nintendo Entertainment System.
28. Which Nintendo handheld from 2004 had two screens?
The Nintendo DS. DS stood for Dual Screen.
29. What does RPG stand for?
Role-playing game.
30. What is an NPC?
A non-player character: anyone in the game that the player does not control.
Round four: famous characters
31. Which archaeologist is the hero of Tomb Raider?
Lara Croft.
32. What is the hero of the Halo games called?
Master Chief.
33. In which series do you play as the Spartan warrior Kratos?
God of War.
34. Which game series follows the monster hunter Geralt of Rivia?
The Witcher, based on the books by the Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski.
35. Who is Sonic's two-tailed fox sidekick?
Tails. His real name is Miles Prower, a pun on miles per hour.
36. Which Street Fighter character made "Hadouken" famous?
Ryu, along with his friend Ken.
37. In Portal, which AI keeps promising you cake?
GLaDOS. The cake, as the game's fans say, is a lie.
38. Which green Minecraft monster explodes when it gets close?
The Creeper.
39. Which actor voiced Mario from the 1990s until 2023?
Charles Martinet.
40. What is the name of the princess Mario usually rescues?
Princess Peach, called Princess Toadstool in early English versions.
Round five: modern hits
41. Who created Minecraft?
Markus Persson, known as Notch, in Sweden.
42. Which company bought Minecraft in 2014, and for how much?
Microsoft, for 2.5 billion dollars.
43. What is the best-selling video game of all time?
Minecraft, with well over 300 million copies sold.
44. In Fortnite, what do players jump out of at the start of every match?
The Battle Bus, a flying school bus hanging from a hot-air balloon.
45. Which fictional city is the setting of Grand Theft Auto V?
Los Santos, a version of Los Angeles.
46. Which 2017 Zelda game gave Link a huge open world to explore?
Breath of the Wild.
47. In Among Us, what are the crewmates trying to do?
Finish their tasks and find the impostor before the impostor gets them.
48. Which farming game was made almost entirely by one person, Eric Barone?
Stardew Valley.
49. Which 2016 phone game sent millions of people outside to catch Pokémon?
Pokémon Go.
50. In Pokémon Red and Blue, which town does your journey start in?
Pallet Town.
Round six: the hard round
51. What was the first commercially sold arcade video game, released in 1971?
Computer Space, built by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney before they founded Atari.
52. In which year did the North American video game market crash?
1983.
53. Which famously bad Atari game was buried in a New Mexico landfill?
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The cartridges were dug up in Alamogordo in 2014.
54. What was Pac-Man called in Japan?
Puck Man. The name was changed for America, where the company feared vandals would scratch the P into a rude word.
55. Who created both Mario and Zelda?
Shigeru Miyamoto.
56. Which 1980 Atari game hid one of the first Easter eggs?
Adventure. Its programmer, Warren Robinett, hid his name in a secret room because Atari did not credit its designers.
57. What is the highest possible score in the original Pac-Man?
3,333,360 points, for a perfect game through all 255 levels.
58. In which year did the first Pokémon games come out in Japan?
1996.
59. In which Japanese city does Nintendo still have its headquarters?
Kyoto.
60. Which game went into space with a Russian cosmonaut in 1993?
Tetris, on a Game Boy taken to the Mir space station by Aleksandr Serebrov.
How to run a video game round
Mix the generations. A good round has arcade questions for the people who played them in the eighties and Minecraft questions for the people who did not. Alternate them, so no table goes four questions without a chance.
Use sound as a tie-breaker. The opening notes of the Super Mario theme or the Tetris music are recognised almost instantly. Play three seconds and give the point to whoever names it first.
Not sure how to put a whole night together? Pub quiz rounds explained walks through the usual round types and the order that works.
More quiz questions
For more rounds to read aloud, trivia questions by category has sixty questions across ten subjects, with a full round each on food, sport and the nineties. If you would rather play than host, try the 500 pub quiz questions online. For a gentler start, 50 easy trivia questions is the warm-up, and hard trivia questions is the other end of the scale.
And if you want the stories behind the answers, NerdSip turns any subject, from the history of Nintendo to how game engines work, into five-minute courses with a quick question at the end of each lesson.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are good video game trivia questions for a quiz night?
Questions about characters and history, because they never go out of date. What was Mario first called? Jumpman. What inspired Pac-Man? A pizza with a slice missing. Where was Tetris made? The Soviet Union, in 1984. Avoid sales figures and esports results, which change too often.
What is the best-selling video game of all time?
Minecraft, with well over 300 million copies sold across every platform since its release.
What was the first video game?
It depends on the definition. Tennis for Two ran on an oscilloscope in 1958 and Spacewar! on a university computer in 1962, but the first video game sold commercially was the arcade machine Computer Space, in 1971.
Is Zelda the name of the hero?
No. The hero of The Legend of Zelda is Link, and Zelda is the princess. It is the most common mix-up in gaming, which makes it a perfect easy question.
How many questions should a video game round have?
Ten is the standard round. Mix old and new games so that every table gets a chance, and keep one music question back as a tie-breaker.
Every NerdSip course clears a four-layer fact-checking pipeline before it reaches the app: grounded in live sources, scored nightly, gated on failure, and reviewable by a person at one tap. Articles on this blog are drafted with AI assistance, then researched, verified, and edited by our team.
Editorial responsibility: ai51 UG (haftungsbeschränkt). Responsible editor named in the imprint.
📚 Keep Learning
- 50 Easy Trivia Questions and Answers (Everyone Should Get These)
- 50 Hard Trivia Questions That Stump Almost Everyone
- Food Trivia Questions with Answers: 60 for Your Next Quiz
- 50 90s Trivia Questions and Answers
- Every Pub Quiz Round, Explained (And How to Prepare for Each)
- How to Get Better at Pub Quizzes (Without Reading More Trivia)
Explore the NerdSip learning hubs
The blog is our editorial layer. When you want to move from reading into doing, these hubs organize the rest of NerdSip by format, including the app itself and the press that has written about it.
Your weak round, sorted in five minutes a day
Everyone has the round where they just write a question mark. NerdSip writes you a short course on any subject, from the history of Nintendo to the people who built the first arcade games, with a question at the end of every lesson so it actually sticks before the next quiz night.
4.7 stars from 380 reviews · 10,000+ learners
