Tea Leaves

The Game Geek Quiz

by peterb

Googling for the answers is cheating. Some questions are easy. Others are harder. I don't believe any are impossible. If you answer them all right, you win nothing but the pride (or the shame, depending on how you want to view it) of spending such a large percentage of your brain cells on videogame and computer trivia. Feel free to contribute guesses in the comments.

1. What was "Contra-Dextra Avenue"?

2. What was the first (computer) adventure game that took a text adventure interface and added significant graphics?

3. Who wrote most of the games for Sirius Software (example game: Gorgon). First name only is OK.

4. Who saw farther?

5. Finish this phrase: "Ho eyoh he ___"

6. This platform game was one of the earliest games to be ported to nearly every popular home computer (and game platform) in existence in 1983. It was famous for having versions on just about everything, from the Vic-20 up through all the Atari consoles and computers, to the Apple ][, and beyond. What was its name?

7. In the superb chess-like game Archon, each piece had a counterpart. The dark goblin was the opposite of the human Knight. The dragon was opposed by the Phoenix. The basilisk was opposed by the unicorn. What light-side piece corresponded to the dark-side banshee?

8. How can you open the jewel-encrusted egg without damaging the clockwork canary?

9. Rick and Ilsa. Heloise and Abelard. Guybrush and ______?

10. Eric Snider wrote the classic card game Eric's Ultimate Solitaire for the Mac, later ported to other platforms. Solitaire, of course, is a game that people play without computers, and Eric's Ultimate Solitaire is a computer implementation of that game. In the early 1980's, Eric's older brother David wrote a successful game which took another non-computer game and put it into software. What was it? (CMU alumni who know the answer because you are friends with Eric are asked not to give this one away.)

11. Leisure Suit Larry was actually a with-graphics reworking of an earlier, text-only game. What was the name of that game?

12. In Silas Warner's classic game Castle Wolfenstein, you played a prisoner trying to escape from a Nazi castle. Patrolling the castle were scores of Nazi soldiers. There were also SS officers who would try to track you down once they discovered corpses of common soldiers. The SS were very hard to kill because...?

13. In the game The Prisoner (and Prisoner 2), what ASCII character was used to represent the player?

14. The arcade game Tron put the name of a computer language at the bottom of the screen to identify what "level" you were on; each time you cleared all four stages, the language changed. What language was used for the very first level?

15. What were the dungeons in the game Realm of Impossibility named after, thematically?

16. In the Atari 800 game Star Raiders, what color did the screen turn when you turned on your shields?

17. Everyone knows the story about how Warren Robinett hid his name in the Atari 2600 Adventure cartridge as a hard-to-get easter egg. Most people who played it obsessively have done it, I'd guess -- you have to go into the black castle, find an invisible dot, drag the dot back across the dungeon, and then figure out that it lets you walk through a certain wall, if you're dragging it behind you. Your reward is seeing the creator's name, in glowing chromaluminescent letters. (And if you've never tried Adventure, try this Flash version). Fewer people remember that the three cute duckies fearsome dragons who chase you have names. What are they?

18. This Atari computer game used the theme song from the Alfred Hitchcock TV show ("Funeral March of the Marionettes"; MIDI sample is not actually from the game) for its title screen. What game was it?

19. This game had a cult following that lasted well into the 1990's, despite the fact that it was practically unplayable. You and your opponent each had a shield and an axe. The camera was situated directly above you. From this odd top-down view, you could independently control your left arm, your right arm, and move around. Combat consisted of flailing into the opponent while "blood" spurted until pieces started falling off. Then the guy who was losing would run away, and you would chase him hopelessly for 10 minutes cursing the controls. What was the name of this game?

20. How many hostages did you have to rescue to have a 'perfect' round in the original Choplifter?

Answers will be posted in the next few days. The answers have been posted, but feel free to make your guesses below, anyway, before peeking at the answer key.

Posted by peterb at January 5, 2005 06:25 PM | Bookmark This