Retro Video Games Quiz

A short history of the arcade and console boom

Video games went from a curiosity to a cultural force in barely a decade. In the 1970s, most people first played in bars, bowling alleys and pizza parlors, feeding coins into tall wooden cabinets with simple black-and-white screens. By the late '70s and early '80s, arcades were packed with teenagers chasing high scores, and the best players became local celebrities with their initials glowing on the leaderboard.

Home consoles followed the same path, starting with simple tennis-style games and growing into libraries of swappable cartridges. Early systems had very little memory, so designers leaned on clever tricks, bright colors and catchy beeps to make limited hardware feel exciting. The industry also went through a painful slump in the early 1980s, when a flood of low-quality games made stores and shoppers lose faith for a while. The recovery that followed set up the friendly rivalries of the 8-bit and 16-bit years.

To keep this era straight, group facts by company and by decade. Most of the big names started either as arcade makers or as toy and electronics firms, and remembering which camp a company came from makes its later moves easier to recall. A great score here is anything over half, so celebrate every one you get.