Trivia Set: 1984-1993
Edited October 24, 2023
During the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, my friends Ken and Penelope ran a weekly online bar trivia night for a small group of people. I hosted it a few times, and this is the first set of questions I made.Making these was an interesting challenge. I developed the theory that the ideal bar trivia question is one that 80% of teams get correct, and the ideal set is one where it's a different 80% of the teams for each question. This way everybody gets to feel good in general, and the game comes down to a definitive but narrow edge in knowledge, rather than anybody getting totally steamrolled.
A question that nobody gets is a clear failure. A question that everybody gets is fine if you want to throw out some early gimmes just to keep the mood high, or if you want to put Never Gonna Give You Up in the music round as a joke, but generally should be avoided.
The way these sessions worked was that the last round was a single question, and teams would wager up to half a round's worth of points (each of the early rounds gave 2 points per question, so half-points could be given when necessary) based on their confidence in their answer.
The PDF I exported from the original Google Slides presentation doesn't include the song clips for the music round. Here they are in a convenient ZIP file.
The answers, just in case you don't know all of them: