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50 free Retro trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
44 free Retro trivia questions with answers. Retro trivia is not about one decade. It is the drawer full of things that used to be everywhere: the Slinky that sold 400 units in 90 minutes at a Philadelphia department store, the Rubik's Cube that started life as the Magic Cube, the Atari cartridges buried in a New Mexico landfill, the Walkman that had to be sold as the Soundabout in America, and the pet rock that made an advertising man a millionaire in a single Christmas. This quiz runs 50 questions across toys, gadgets, snacks, cars, arcades and fads from the 1950s through the 1990s: hula hoops and mood rings, Etch A Sketch and Simon, 8-tracks and floppy disks, TV dinners and Tang, New Coke and Crystal Pepsi, Pong, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, the DeLorean and the Beetle, Pogs, slap bracelets, Tamagotchis and Cabbage Patch riots. It starts easy and ends with questions for people who remember which department store demonstrated the first Slinky. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedia entry on the product, and each question shows its source once you have answered, so it works for a themed party, a family gathering that spans generations, or a nostalgia round at the pub.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Slinky inventor Richard James's job when he saw a spring 'walk' off a shelf in 1943?
Naval engineer
Richard James was a naval engineer at a Philadelphia shipyard, developing springs to steady ship instruments, when one tumbled off a shelf and kept 'walking'.
Q 02How long did it take the first 400 Slinkys to sell at their 1945 Philadelphia department store debut?
90 minutes
All 400 Slinkys sold in 90 minutes at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia in November 1945, priced at a dollar each.
Q 03The Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by a Hungarian sculptor and professor of what?
Architecture
Ernő Rubik taught architecture at Budapest's Academy of Applied Arts and built the cube in 1974 as a teaching aid for spatial relationships.
Q 04Roughly how many Rubik's Cubes had been sold worldwide as of January 2024?
500 million
About 500 million Rubik's Cubes had been sold by January 2024, making it the best-selling puzzle toy; the cube has some 43 quintillion possible arrangements.
Q 05What did French electrician André Cassagnes originally call the Etch A Sketch?
L'Écran Magique
Cassagnes called his 1959 invention L'Écran Magique, 'the magic screen'; the Ohio Art Company of Bryan, Ohio bought the rights and launched it in the US in 1960.
Q 06The inside of an Etch A Sketch screen is coated with a fine powder of which metal?
Aluminium
The glass is coated from inside with fine aluminium powder mixed with tiny plastic beads; the stylus scrapes it away and shaking re-coats the screen.
Q 07The View-Master, whose reels hold seven stereoscopic pairs of pictures, was introduced at which event?
The 1939 New York World's Fair
William Gruber and Harold Graves introduced the View-Master at the 1939 New York World's Fair; the US military later bought 100,000 viewers for training.
Q 08Wham-O's plastic hula hoop went on sale in 1958 and sold how many in under four months?
25 million
Wham-O sold 25 million plastic hula hoops in under four months in 1958, and sales passed 100 million within two years.
Q 09The Pet Rock was created in 1975 by Gary Dahl, who worked in what industry?
Advertising
Gary Dahl was an advertising executive in Los Gatos, California; he sold about 1.5 million Pet Rocks at $3.95 each before the fad faded in early 1976.
Q 10The mood ring craze of 1975 relied on which technology to change colour with skin temperature?
Thermotropic liquid crystals
Mood rings contain thermotropic liquid crystals that twist and reflect different wavelengths as skin temperature changes; Joshua Reynolds marketed them in New York in 1975.
Q 11Edward Craven Walker invented the lava lamp in 1963 after seeing an egg timer bubbling where?
On a pub stove
Craven Walker saw a homemade liquid-filled timer bubbling on a pub stove in Dorset; his first lava lamp, the Astro, went on sale in 1963 from Poole.
Q 12The Simon memory game was launched in 1978 at which famous New York nightclub?
Studio 54
Milton Bradley launched Simon with a party at Studio 54 in 1978; Ralph Baer and Howard Morrison based it on Atari's arcade game Touch Me.
Q 13Under what name did Xavier Roberts originally sell the dolls that became Cabbage Patch Kids?
Little People
Q 21The first floppy disks, made by IBM in 1971, were how big across?
8 inches
IBM's first floppy, the 1971 read-only 'memory disk', was 8 inches across and held about 80 kilobytes; 5.25-inch disks followed in 1976.
Q 22Which company, in floppies since 1983, sold its last 3.5-inch disks in March 2011?
Sony
Sony, which introduced the 3.5-inch format in the early 1980s, sold its last 3.5-inch floppies in March 2011, by which time the disk was mostly a skeuomorph in software menus.
Q 23Push-button Touch-Tone telephones were first shown to the public at which event?
The 1962 Seattle World's Fair
The name had to change because Fisher-Price already owned it; Coleco began mass-producing the dolls in 1982.
Q 14How many possible answers does the die inside a Magic 8 Ball carry?
20
The Magic 8 Ball's floating die is an icosahedron, so it carries 20 answers: ten positive, five non-committal and five negative.
Q 15The Tamagotchi's name is a portmanteau of the Japanese word for 'watch' and the Japanese word for what?
Egg
Tamagotchi blends tamago, Japanese for egg, with uotchi, 'watch'; Bandai released the egg-shaped toy in Japan on November 23, 1996.
Q 16The 1990s Pogs craze took its name from POG, a brand of what?
Fruit juice
POG was a Haleakala Dairy fruit juice of passion fruit, orange and guava; Hawaiian educator Blossom Galbiso revived the milk-cap game with its lids in 1991.
Q 17Stuart Anders, who invented the slap bracelet in 1983, worked as what in Wisconsin?
Teacher
Stuart Anders was a high-school shop teacher in Wisconsin; cheap knock-offs with thinner steel could cut wrists, and many schools banned the bracelets.
Q 18The Sony Walkman went on sale in Japan in July 1979. What was it initially called in the United States?
Soundabout
It was the Stowaway in Britain and the Freestyle in Australia and Sweden before Sony standardised the name; 'Walkman' entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1986.
Q 19Sony's Betamax lost the format war to VHS, yet Sony kept making blank Beta cassettes until when?
2016
The last blank Betamax cassettes shipped in March 2016, fourteen years after the recorders themselves stopped in August 2002.
Q 20The 8-track cartridge was created in 1965 by a consortium led by the founder of which aviation company?
Lear Jet
Bill Lear of Lear Jet led the consortium, with Ampex, Ford, Motorola and RCA, that created the 8-track in 1965; Ford offered players on 1966 models.
Bell System first demonstrated Touch-Tone push-button dialling to the public at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair; commercial service began in Pennsylvania in November 1963.
Q 24The first telephone pager system was patented in 1949 by which inventor?
Al Gross
Al Gross, who also pioneered the walkie-talkie, patented the first telephone pager in 1949; Japan's last paging service shut down in 2019.
Q 25What did Polaroid's SX-70 folding instant camera cost when Edwin Land unveiled it in April 1972?
$180
The SX-70 listed at $180 when Edwin Land unveiled it in April 1972, with ten-shot film packs at $6.90; Polaroid sold about 700,000 by mid-1974.
Q 26The 2600 console was released in 1977 under what original name?
Atari Video Computer System
It launched in 1977 as the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) and was rebranded the 2600 in November 1982; the 1980 home port of Space Invaders was its killer app.
Q 27In which state did Atari bury 14 truckloads of unsold cartridges, including E.T., in 1983?
New Mexico
Atari dumped the cartridges in a landfill at Alamogordo, New Mexico; a 2014 excavation recovered about 1,300 of an estimated 728,000 buried, confirming the long-rumoured burial.
Q 28Pong, the first commercially successful video game, was created in 1972 by Allan Alcorn as what?
A training exercise
Nolan Bushnell assigned Pong to Alcorn as a training exercise; the prototype went into Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, and Sears sold the home version for Christmas 1975.
Q 29What was Pac-Man originally called in Japan?
Puck Man
Namco released it in Japan as Puck Man on May 22, 1980; Midway renamed it Pac-Man for the US, fearing vandals would alter the P on cabinets.
Q 30What are the four ghosts in Pac-Man called?
Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde
The four ghosts are Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde, coloured red, pink, cyan and orange, and each has its own chasing behaviour.