80s Trivia Quiz
This 80s trivia quiz packs ten questions from the decade of New Coke, mall arcades, and "Who shot J.R.?" — the snacks, movies, TV, toys, and tech that defined the 1980s. Answer them in the widget for an instant score, or scroll past it and read every question and answer in full. It's free, and there's no sign-up.
Question 1 of 10
Coca-Cola launched New Coke on April 23, 1985 — and the backlash was so fierce that the original formula came back after how many days?
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1. Coca-Cola launched New Coke on April 23, 1985 — and the backlash was so fierce that the original formula came back after how many days?
Answer: 79. Protest groups, thousands of furious calls a day, and plunging sales forced Coca-Cola to surrender on July 11, 1985 — 79 days after the switch. Bottlers ordered 24 million cases of the renamed Coca-Cola Classic within 48 hours of the announcement. Go deeper: The New Coke Failure & the Reintroduction of Coca-Cola Classic.
2. Coca-Cola gave Cherry Coke its first public tryout at the 1982 World's Fair — in which American city?
Answer: Knoxville. Cherry Coke debuted at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, then hit store shelves nationally in 1985 — the same chaotic year as New Coke. It worked out considerably better: rivals soon answered with Pepsi Wild Cherry and Dr Pepper Cherry. Go deeper: A Look Into The Intriguing History of Cherry Coke.
3. Which McDonald's burger came in a two-sided styrofoam box built to "keep the hot side hot, and the cool side cool"?
Answer: McDLT. The McDLT ran from 1984 to 1991, with a young Jason Alexander singing its praises in the commercials. The two-sided box was the whole product — and when styrofoam became an environmental villain, the burger died with it. Go deeper: The Most Iconic Discontinued Mcdonald’s Menu Items.
4. Finish Jolt Cola's proudly unhealthy 1985 battle cry: "All the sugar and…"
Answer: twice the caffeine. Founder C.J. Rapp loaded Jolt with 70 milligrams of caffeine per serving — more than double Coca-Cola or Pepsi — and sold it as the anti-health-craze soda. The formula outlived the decade, hanging on until 2009. Go deeper: Why Jolt Cola Was Discontinued.
5. "Avoid the Noid!" Which pizza chain spent the late 80s warning America about its own claymation villain?
Answer: Domino's. Domino's introduced the Noid in 1986 as the personification of everything that could ruin a pizza in transit — brought to life in claymation by Will Vinton Studios, the shop behind the California Raisins. Avoiding him was shorthand for the chain's 30-minute delivery promise. Go deeper: The Weird Tale of the Domino’s Mascot the Noid.
6. Everyone quotes it as "Luke, I am your father." What does Darth Vader actually say in The Empire Strikes Back (1980)?
Answer: No, I am your father. The real line is "No, I am your father" — a direct reply to Luke's accusation about his father's fate. The misquote is so widespread that it's become a textbook example of the Mandela Effect, the phenomenon of masses of people sharing the same false memory.
7. Which film finished 1985 as the year's highest-grossing movie, both in America and worldwide?
Answer: Back to the Future. Back to the Future took roughly $210 million domestically and $381 million worldwide in its original run — comfortably ahead of the year's real runners-up, Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rocky IV. Not bad for a movie every studio initially passed on.
8. Roughly 83 million Americans tuned in to Dallas in November 1980 to learn who shot J.R. Ewing. Who pulled the trigger?
Answer: Kristin Shepard. The November 21, 1980 reveal drew an estimated 83 million American viewers — a 76 percent share of everything on television that night — to learn that Kristin Shepard, J.R.'s scheming sister-in-law and mistress, had done it. The eight-month wait invented the modern cliffhanger frenzy.
9. Before Ideal Toy Corp relaunched it worldwide in 1980, Ernő Rubik's puzzle cube was sold in Hungary under what name?
Answer: the Magic Cube. Rubik invented his "Magic Cube" in 1974, and Ideal renamed it after its creator for the 1980 international launch. An estimated 200 million cubes sold from 1980 to 1983 — and by 1981, three of the ten best-selling books in America were guides to solving it.
10. In September 1983, Atari secretly dumped truckloads of unsold game cartridges into a New Mexico landfill. Which movie tie-in game became the symbol of the burial?
Answer: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Atari's E.T. was programmed in about five weeks to make Christmas 1982, and it flopped so hard that roughly 728,000 cartridges — E.T. among dozens of other titles — went into the Alamogordo landfill. A 2014 excavation dug about 1,300 of them back up and sold many at auction.
80s Trivia Quiz FAQ
What are some 80s trivia questions?
80s trivia questions are quiz questions about the people, products, and pop culture of the 1980s — the snacks, movies, TV shows, toys, and technology that defined the decade. The classics ask how long New Coke survived before Coca-Cola surrendered, who shot J.R., and what Atari really buried in the New Mexico desert in 1983.
The ten questions above favor the corners of the decade people actually lived through — fast-food gimmicks, soda flops, claymation ad villains — over dates and dry facts. Each one comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still tells you a story.
If the grocery-aisle questions turn out to be your strong suit, our roundup of discontinued cereals goes deeper into the decade's strangest breakfasts, including Mr. T Cereal and the E.T. cereal Kellogg's pulled after about a year.
What are some fun facts about the 80s?
The decade's marketing stumbles make some of the best trivia. Wendy's "Where's the beef?" debuted in January 1984 with 81-year-old Clara Peller growling the line that entered the language — even the 1984 presidential race. And 7 Up spent 1988 learning a hard lesson with 7 UP Gold, a caffeinated version of the famously caffeine-free soda that came and went within the year.
The toy aisle got genuinely dangerous. When Cabbage Patch Kids shortages hit in Christmas 1983, about 5,000 shoppers mobbed one West Virginia store stocked with only 120 dolls, and a Pennsylvania store manager famously armed himself with a baseball bat to hold back a crowd of a thousand.
Even breakfast was strange: Quaker Oats built a cereal around Mr. T in 1984, and Kellogg's sold an E.T. cereal with alien-shaped marshmallows that lasted barely a year on shelves.
What iconic things happened in the 80s?
The 1980s packed in an unusual number of genuinely iconic moments. MTV signed on August 1, 1981, and changed how music, fashion, and advertising looked; Apple introduced the Macintosh with its dystopian "1984" Super Bowl commercial; and Nintendo's NES arrived from Japan in 1985 to resurrect an American video game industry left for dead after the 1983 crash.
The cola wars hit their absurd peak mid-decade: Pepsi signed Michael Jackson for a record $5 million in 1983, and Coca-Cola answered by reformulating its century-old recipe into New Coke — a 79-day disaster the quiz above covers in question one.
Style itself became an event. Shoulder pads, neon, leg warmers, and Air Jordans all trace to the decade, and our tour of 1980s fashion trends shows how music video culture drove most of it.
What are 90s trivia questions?
90s trivia questions do the same job for the following decade — quizzing you on the snacks, movies, TV shows, toys, and tech of the 1990s, from the clear-cola war and Beanie Babies to the midnight launch of Windows 95.
We built a full 90s trivia quiz as the sibling to this page, in the same format: ten questions in the widget, an instant score, and every answer explained in full below it. Plenty of players search for "80s and 90s trivia" together — if that's you, take both back to back and see which decade you really belong to.