Pub Quiz Heaven

Those that know me will know that I’m a huge fan of Pub Quizzes. They are a big thing in the UK (or at least were when I lived there). For those of you that are not familiar, they a typically run at a bar where you form a team of four to six people with your friends. You make up an amusing name for your team and answer questions read by the quiz master. You write the answers on a provided sheet of paper and there are typically four or five rounds of ten questions. Each round is usually themed as something like “sport” or “general knowledge”.

In between rounds you exchange papers with another team and mark each others papers as the answers are read out.

Lots of fun, but sadly not very common in the US, apart from the Irish or English bars.

Now, an Irish bar recently opened in Kirkland, the Wilde Rover - a decent bar with a great atmosphere and great food. Handily it also started up a pub quiz night on Wednesday evenings.

Tonight I hooked up with Andy (The ZMan) and his running club friends for the quiz. We started out badly with a two out of ten and proceeded to do mediocre things. There was even a round themed on “fashion”, which, surprisingly, we didn’t do too bad on.

Anyhow, when round three which was announced as “the classic video game round”, we were a little bit ecstatic to say the least.

We were writing down answers before the quiz master and even finished the question. I believe “Dragon’s Lair” was written down before he’d finished saying “Which laserdisc game featured…”.

There was even a four point question if you could name all the ghosts in Pacman. Four points scored. Inky, Pink, Blinky and Clyde.

We only got two question wrong, the first being the number of enemies in the first wave of Space Invaders. We had 56, but the answer was 55.

But it was the second that was really interesting to me: “What was Sega’s first game?”

I had a problem with this question as I knew that Sega started out shipping coin-op games to US Military stationed overseas. I thought the answer should be “pinball”, so I asked for the clarification “game or video-game”? The answer was video-game and we were stumped.

It turned out to be Periscope.

Anyhow, that round thrust us into the lead and we held on it.

We won!

The $60 almost paid the bar tab, and when delivering our winnings to us, the quiz master quipped “You smoked that game round - you guys didn’t get out much as kids did you?”

To which Andy had the perfect response: “We spent so much time playing video games that we didn’t get laid until we were 35!”

A fun evening.