Trivia Whiz

Trivia games on PC had one major pitfall in 1990: without the internet, without a database, and without proper sound, they were mostly good for one afternoon, after which you'd get bored with your own knowledge. Trivia Whiz by Micro F/X Software was a shareware title that tried to change that.

The principle is straightforward — you get a question from various general knowledge categories and you answer it. No story, no characters, no world to explore. Pure testing of what you have in your head. On the DOS platform of 1990, this wasn't exactly exceptional, but the shareware distribution model — where George Broussard and his team gave you the first batch of questions for free and charged for the rest — was a sensible way to convince people to open their wallets for a text-based trivia game.

The controls are exactly as simple as you'd imagine. Keyboard, select your answer, confirm. Text-mode interface, no grand graphical ambitions. The game stands and falls entirely on the quality and quantity of questions — and that's exactly where the catch is. The shareware version naturally only shows a sample of what the full package offered, so it's hard to judge the depth of content as a whole. What works is the pace: questions alternate quickly and you're not bogged down by unnecessary animations.

What Trivia Whiz brought was mainly proof that the trivia genre was viable on home PC at a time when most gamers were reaching for action or adventure games. Today the game has aged exactly as expected — the question database is dated, some answers reflect American realities from the turn of the eighties and nineties, and without an opponent over the network, even the small amount of social tension that keeps trivia games alive disappears. Playing it solo against the computer in 2024 is about as thrilling as transcribing an encyclopedia.

In the browser, it's worth checking out Trivia Whiz mainly out of curiosity — to see what the genre looked like in DOS before Who Wants to Be a Millionaire came along and turned quizzes into television spectacle. A nostalgic look for those who remember the shareware era, more of a historical artifact than living entertainment for everyone else.