Consoles, Classics & Code
The games and machines that built the biggest entertainment industry.
Which company created the character Mario?
Film, music, games, sport and the things we do for fun.
Not everything has to be improving. This is the section for the things people actually spend their evenings and weekends on.
Film and television, music, comics and animation, video games, sport, and puzzles for their own sake. The questions are lighter, but they are researched to the same standard as everything else here — no made-up numbers, no half-remembered chart positions, and an explanation after every answer.
It is also the best section to play with other people. Most of these work as pub-quiz rounds, and the explanations settle the arguments.
Instruments, composers and the songs everyone knows.
Cinema classics, cult hits and the small screen.
Records, legends and unforgettable moments in play.
Drawn worlds, from newspaper strips to feature films.
How news gets made, checked and published.
Games of reasoning and the thinking behind them.
Consoles, classics and the shorthand players use.
The games and machines that built the biggest entertainment industry.
Which company created the character Mario?
Why a curveball curves, why records fall, and what altitude does to a race.
A spinning ball curves in flight because of what?
The national film industries and movements that shaped the medium elsewhere.
Which country produces the most feature films per year?
The sitar, the koto, the djembe and the bagpipes — instruments beyond the orchestra.
The sitar is most closely associated with which country?
Distances, dimensions and durations that are fixed by rule across every sport.
How high is a basketball hoop in professional play?
Where the world's sports came from, and how their rules got written down.
Basketball was invented in 1891 by a teacher looking for what?
Hanoi, Konigsberg, magic squares and the structures hiding underneath famous puzzles.
In the Tower of Hanoi, which rule must never be broken?
Coincidences, false positives and the places where reasoning about probability reliably fails.
The gambler's fallacy is the belief that what?
Persistence of vision is the wrong explanation and has been for a century. What actually makes still drawings move is apparent…
Read article 10 min readA bulletin holds about three thousand words and the world produces rather more than that. What survives the filter is shaped by…
Read article 10 min readHuman biology has not changed in a century, but the record book keeps moving. Timing precision, surfaces, equipment, nutrition…
Read article33 published quizzes across 7 topics, 330 questions in total. Every one is researched, written and checked by hand.
The mix here is 10 easy, 19 medium and 4 hard. Difficulty is about how obscure the answers are, not how fast you have to be — there is no timer on any quiz.
About 7 minutes on average, ranging from 6 to 8. Playing every quiz in this section would take roughly 4 hours.
No. Every quiz is free and playable straight away. An optional free account only saves your scores across devices.
Yes — every question has a short explanation of why the right answer is right, shown the moment you answer, whether you got it or not.