All 13 questions
Prefer reading to playing? Here is every question of this quiz — answers come with your score.
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Pong (Atari, 1972) is often credited to Nolan Bushnell, but he actually assigned it as a training exercise to a young engineer who did the real design work. Who was that engineer?
- Allan Alcorn
- Steve Bristow
- Ralph Baer
- Ted Dabney
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The way the aliens in Space Invaders (1978) speed up as you clear the screen was a deliberate difficulty mechanic the game's designer programmed from the start.
- True
- False
-
In the original Pac-Man (1980), one ghost's AI makes it break off pursuit and flee toward the maze's bottom-left corner whenever it comes within about eight tiles of Pac-Man. Which ghost behaves this way?
- Inky
- Blinky
- Pinky
- Clyde
-
Pac-Man was first released in Japan in 1980 under the title '___ Man,' a name changed for the Western market because the first letter was easy to vandalize into an obscenity.
-
Mario debuted in the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong under the name Jumpman. What profession was he given in that game, before he later became a plumber?
- Firefighter
- Electrician
- Carpenter
- Mechanic
-
Galaga (Namco, 1981) is a direct sequel that expanded on the fixed-shooter formula of which earlier Namco game?
- Xevious
- Gaplus
- Galaxian
- Bosconian
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Centipede (Atari, 1981) is historically notable for being co-designed by one of the first women to program a commercial arcade game, alongside Ed Logg. Who was she?
- Brenda Romero
- Dona Bailey
- Carol Shaw
- Roberta Williams
-
Q*bert (1982) was developed by Gottlieb, a company historically far better known for manufacturing pinball machines than video games.
- True
- False
-
Frogger (1981) was developed by Konami, but because Konami lacked manufacturing reach in North America at the time, it was distributed there by which company?
- Taito
- Midway
- Sega
- Atari
-
The North American video game crash of 1983 is referred to in Japan as the 'Atari ___,' naming the company most associated with the market's collapse.
-
Which infamous 1982 Atari 2600 game, whose millions of unsold cartridges were reportedly buried in a New Mexico landfill, became a lasting symbol of the 1983 crash?
- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
- Yars' Revenge
- Pitfall!
- Custer's Revenge
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The first Pong prototype was installed at Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, and reportedly stopped working because its coin box had overflowed with quarters.
- True
- False
-
Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) was designed by an engineer who reportedly had to build custom hardware because no existing system could run his vision. Who was he?
- Gunpei Yokoi
- Toru Iwatani
- Tomohiro Nishikado
- Masaya Nakamura