The 50 Hardest Video Game Trivia Questions (And Answers)

Every gamer thinks they know their stuff until someone asks them what the Konami Code actually unlocks in Gradius on the NES. Or what year Pong was first tested in a bar in Sunnyvale, California. These are the kinds of questions that separate players who have truly lived and breathed gaming culture from those who just pick up a controller on weekends.

We compiled 50 of the most deviously difficult trivia questions across every era and genre of gaming. Some draw from obscure development history. Others test your knowledge of in-game lore that most players skip right past. A few require you to remember specific numbers, names, and dates that only the most dedicated fans would retain.

Retro Era: The 1970s and 1980s

The golden age of arcades and early consoles is a treasure trove of obscure facts. Did you know that Space Invaders was so popular in Japan that it caused a national coin shortage in 1978? Or that the original Donkey Kong arcade cabinet was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto as his very first project at Nintendo?

Here are some questions that dig even deeper. The protagonist of Metroid was revealed to be a woman only if you finished the game fast enough. The exact time threshold for the best ending in the original NES version was under one hour. Most players in 1986 had no idea Samus Aran was female until they saw that ending screen.

The Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man sold over 7 million copies, but it was widely considered one of the worst ports ever made. The programmer, Tod Frye, had to work with just 4 kilobytes of ROM space, which is less memory than a single modern emoji takes up.

The 1990s: Console Wars and PC Gaming

The Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis era produced some of gaming's most legendary moments. Final Fantasy VI (released as Final Fantasy III in North America) featured an opera scene that pushed the SNES sound chip to its absolute limits. The composer, Nobuo Uematsu, has said it remains one of his proudest achievements.

On the PC side, Doom was so widely installed on work computers in the 1990s that Microsoft's IT department reportedly called it a bigger security threat than any virus. The game's co-creator, John Carmack, pioneered the binary space partitioning technique that made its fast rendering possible.

Question to test yourself: What was the working title of GoldenEye 007 during its development at Rare? The answer is "The Spy Who Loved Me," because the team originally planned to adapt a different Bond film before switching to GoldenEye.

The 2000s: Online Gaming Explodes

The launch of Halo 2 on Xbox Live in 2004 fundamentally changed multiplayer gaming. The matchmaking system, designed by a team led by Max Hoberman, introduced the TrueSkill ranking algorithm that Microsoft later patented and used across all Xbox Live titles.

World of Warcraft launched on November 23, 2004, with a server capacity designed for 500,000 simultaneous players. Within the first month, Blizzard had to urgently expand because over 1 million people had subscribed. The Corrupted Blood incident of 2005, where a glitch caused an in-game plague to spread uncontrollably, was later studied by real epidemiologists as a model for pandemic behavior.

Modern Era Deep Cuts

The Last of Us features a giraffe scene that almost did not make it into the final game. Creative director Neil Druckmann fought to keep it because he believed the quiet moment of wonder was essential after hours of intense violence. The animation team spent weeks getting the giraffe's neck movement to look natural.

In Elden Ring, the character Ranni the Witch has four arms because she is inhabiting a doll's body. Her questline is the longest in the game and the only way to reach one of the six possible endings. The lore behind the doll was written by George R.R. Martin as part of the game's mythos.

Development Secrets

Half-Life 2 was delayed by an entire year after the source code was stolen in 2003. Valve employee Gabe Newell personally worked with the FBI to track down the hacker, who turned out to be a German programmer named Axel Gembe. Gembe was eventually arrested after Newell offered him a fake job interview at Valve.

The original Super Mario Bros. clouds and bushes use the exact same sprite, just colored differently. This was a memory-saving trick that went unnoticed by most players for over two decades.

Think You Can Handle It?

These kinds of deep-cut questions are exactly what we build our hardest quizzes around. If you want to put your knowledge to the real test instead of just reading about it, try one of our expert-level quizzes.

Call of Duty Hard QuizPlay now Legend of Zelda TriviaPlay now

The difference between reading trivia and actually being quizzed on it under pressure is enormous. You might know all 50 of these facts right now, but when you are staring at four multiple-choice answers with a timer ticking down, everything changes. That is what makes quiz challenges so addictive.

Whether you scored perfectly in your head or realized you have some gaps to fill, the best way to sharpen your gaming knowledge is to keep testing it. Good luck out there.