90s and 2000s Trivia
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This 90s and 2000s trivia quiz has 99 free questions with answers and covers the two decades together, because for anyone who grew up in them they were one long era: Windows 95 and dial-up, Tamagotchis and Furbies, Pokémon Red and Nintendo 64, Titanic and The Matrix, Nirvana and the Spice Girls, Friends and Seinfeld on one side; the Nokia 3310 and the Razr, PlayStation 2 and the Wii, Shrek and Mean Girls, Myspace, YouTube and the first iPhone on the other. Toys, gadgets, movies, TV, music, fashion fads and the odd bit of science (Dolly the sheep, Pluto's demotion) all get a turn. It splits roughly half and half between the decades and mixes easy crowd-pleasers with questions that will separate the people who actually owned a Razor scooter from those who just remember them. Good for a millennial birthday, a themed pub quiz round or a nostalgic night in. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and each question shows the sentence that confirms it once you have answered.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Windows 95, released in August 1995, introduced which now-familiar feature to the desktop?
The Start button and taskbar
The Start button and taskbar: Windows 95 introduced both, and Microsoft licensed the Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' for its launch ads as a nod to the new button.
Q 02Toy Story, released in 1995, was the first feature film made how?
Entirely with computer animation
Entirely with computer animation: the film hit trouble first, when Disney halted production after disastrous early story reels and Pixar had to rewrite the script.
Q 03Which 1997 film was the first ever to gross $1 billion at the box office?
Titanic
Titanic: James Cameron gave up his $8 million directing fee when the budget ran to $200 million, then saw it become the first film to gross $1 billion, in 1998.
Q 04Which 1993 film overtook E.T. to become the highest-grossing movie of its day?
Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park: Spielberg first hired Phil Tippett to build go-motion puppet dinosaurs, then switched to ILM's digital ones; the film grossed more than $900 million.
Q 05The Matrix (1999) made famous a slow-motion camera trick known as what?
Bullet time
Bullet time: an arc of cameras fires in sequence so the shot seems to orbit a frozen moment; the film won four technical Oscars.
Q 06Nirvana's Nevermind knocked which superstar's album off the top of the Billboard chart in January 1992?
Michael Jackson's Dangerous
Michael Jackson's Dangerous: Nevermind, which had entered the Billboard 200 at number 144, replaced it at number one on the chart dated 11 January 1992.
Q 07Which Spice Girls debut single topped the charts in 37 countries?
Wannabe
Wannabe: it topped the UK chart in July 1996 and then those of 36 more countries; within 18 months the group had sacked Simon Fuller, the manager who launched them.
Q 08The Backstreet Boys formed in 1993 in which city?
Orlando
Orlando: the group was assembled in Orlando, Florida, in 1993 by promoter Lou Pearlman, who also put together NSYNC there.
Q 09Which sitcom's six stars bargained as a group and went on to earn about $1 million each per episode?
Friends
Friends: with the studio hinting that it could carry on with only four of them, the six stuck together in salary talks, and their pay climbed from about $22,000 an episode in the first season.
Q 10Which sitcom's May 1998 finale drew about 76 million American viewers?
Seinfeld
Seinfeld: about 76 million tuned in to see its four leads end up in jail; Jerry Seinfeld had turned down a reported $5 million an episode from NBC to make a tenth season.
Q 11In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith's character grew up in which city before moving to Bel-Air?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia: the theme song tells how Will was 'born and raised' in West Philadelphia before being sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Bel-Air.
Q 12Which console, launched in 1996, stuck with cartridges while its rivals moved to CDs?
Nintendo 64
Nintendo 64: Nintendo kept cartridges for fast loading while the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn used CDs; Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64 were its only North American launch games.
Q 13The Tamagotchi's name combines the Japanese words for 'egg' and what?
Watch
Watch: the name joins tamago, Japanese for egg, to uotchi, the Japanese rendering of 'watch', because the toy was first conceived as a wristwatch.
Q 21Which online giant began in 1994 as a bookseller run from a garage near Seattle?
Amazon
Amazon: Jeff Bezos first called the company Cadabra, but dropped the name after his lawyer heard it as 'cadaver'; the bookshop began in his garage in Bellevue, Washington.
Q 22The Sopranos, which began on HBO in 1999, follows a mob boss who reluctantly starts doing what?
Seeing a psychiatrist
Seeing a psychiatrist: Tony Soprano starts therapy with Dr. Jennifer Melfi after panic attacks, and the sessions frame the series from its 1999 pilot.
Q 23Which company's 3310 handset, launched in 2000, sold about 126 million units and became a byword for toughness?
Nokia
Q 14In 1999 the NSA banned Furbies from its buildings over fears the toys could do what?
Record conversations
Record conversations: the NSA feared Furbies would repeat classified talk, but the head of Tiger Electronics said the toy 'has absolutely no ability to do any recording whatsoever'.
Q 15Japan's first Pokémon games in 1996 were Red and which colour, swapped for Blue in the West?
Green
Green: Pocket Monsters Red and Green launched in Japan in February 1996; a programmer squeezed a secret 151st Pokémon, Mew, into the space freed when debugging tools were removed.
Q 16Beanie Babies fuelled a 1990s collecting bubble largely because their maker Ty did what?
Regularly 'retired' designs
Regularly 'retired' designs: Ty announced that certain animals would stop being made, which sent collectors into a buying frenzy; at the peak Beanie Babies made up 10% of eBay's sales.
Q 17Dolly the sheep, born in 1996, was the first mammal cloned from what?
An adult body cell
An adult body cell: Dolly was cloned from a mammary gland cell of an adult ewe, hence the Dolly Parton name; her remains are displayed at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Q 18The first Harry Potter book's first hardback printing in 1997 ran to how many copies?
500
500: Bloomsbury says it printed just 500 first-edition hardbacks, most bound for libraries, and put initials on the cover for fear boys would shun a book by a woman.
Q 19Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as graduate students at which university?
Stanford
Stanford: Page and Brin met at Stanford in 1995 and built the search engine there as a research project called BackRub before incorporating Google in 1998.
Q 20Which file-sharing service, launched by student Shawn Fanning in 1999, was sued by Metallica a year later?
Napster
Napster: Metallica sued in April 2000 after a demo of its unreleased song 'I Disappear' spread across the service, and court orders shut Napster down in July 2001.
Nokia: more than 126 million 3310s were made before it was retired in 2005, and Finland honoured its durability in 2015 with a national emoji called 'The Unbreakable'.
Q 24Which ride-on craze sold more than five million units within six months of its 2000 launch?
The Razor scooter
The Razor scooter: built as quick transport for adults, it sold five million in six months once Razor pitched it to American children.
Q 25The PS2 sold so well partly because it doubled as what?
A DVD player
A DVD player: the PS2 was a cheap way to play films on disc, and at its Japanese launch in 2000 the best-selling title was a DVD of The Matrix, not a game; Sony counts over 160 million consoles sold.
Q 26Which 2001 film won the very first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature?
Shrek
Shrek: DreamWorks, co-founded by former Disney studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, beat Disney-Pixar's Monsters, Inc. to the first Best Animated Feature Oscar in March 2002.
Q 27Steve Jobs launched the first iPod in October 2001 with which slogan?
1,000 songs in your pocket
1,000 songs in your pocket: the line headed Apple's launch press release because the first iPod's 5 GB hard drive held about a thousand songs; Apple retired the last iPod model in May 2022.
Q 28The Bratz dolls, launched in 2001, originally came as Cloe, Jade, Sasha and who?
Yasmin
Yasmin: designer Carter Bryant sold the Bratz idea to MGA while still on the payroll of rival Mattel, and the two toy firms then fought over the dolls in court for years.
Q 29The Fox singing contest that crowned Kelly Clarkson its first winner in 2002 was based on which British show?
Pop Idol
Pop Idol: Simon Fuller's ITV hit reached America after Rupert Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, who had seen the British show, persuaded him to buy the format for Fox.
Q 30Crocs, the foam clogs launched in 2002, were first sold at what kind of event?
A boat show
A boat show: Crocs unveiled its first clog, the Beach, at the 2002 Fort Lauderdale Boat Show and sold out all 200 pairs; the charms made for its holes are called Jibbitz.