Hardest A Space Odyssey Trivia Quiz | Video Games Mixture

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. Before we fly off into interstellar space, let's do some practice: You have command of a space capsule with limited fuel and your mission is to duplicate a feat that a certain Mr. Armstrong had first done ten years prior to the release of this aptly named game. What's its name?

Answer: Lunar Lander

"Lunar Lander" was not a very successful or popular game, but it pioneered vector graphics and had excellent physics for its time, simulating gravity and inertia quite well. Your controls were even similar to those Neil Armstrong had available during the Apollo landings - you could rotate your ship and fire the main engine to both slow your descent and control direction. To execute a successful landing, you needed to gently touch down on one of the three landing pads before running out of fuel (you could actually successfully land on empty as well if you ran out just before touchdown and did not go fast).

A good landing caused the scenery to change randomly and you got to do it all over.

2. Good work, cadet! Since you've mastered orbits and landings, let's move out through the solar system and gather some resources. You are in command of a small ship maneuvering through space, blasting rocks into smaller rocks, then yet smaller rocks and finally into oblivion. Mind the UFOs by the way as they're another obstacle in this 1979 Atari classic - what is its name?

Answer: Asteroids

Using the same technological platform as "Lunar Lander", "Asteroids" was one of the most successful 1979 games. The seemingly simple task of demolishing a number of splitting rocks each moving on a straight trajectory proved to be quite difficult especially with the controls based on a weightless and frictionless "rotate and thrust" model - once your ship moves, it is practically impossible to ever come to a complete stop again.

3. Well, done, Ensign. We'll give you a larger, more powerful ship now, but your task remains mostly the same: Shoot rocks and defend against aliens, but this time we'll throw in an evil boss that you can only destroy by bombing it with crystals you mine from those rocks. What's the name of the boss and, coincidentally, also this 1982 Williams game?

Answer: Sinistar

The game concept of "Sinistar" was quite complex for its time: Your ship as well as enemy warrior ships could fire at asteroids to release crystals. Worker enemies and your ship could collect these crystals and turn them, respectively, into pieces of the Sinistar boss and Sinibombs.

When the boss was completed, it consisted of 13 pieces which you had to destroy with as many bombs. However your carrying capacity for those bombs was only 20 and the workers and warriors could intercept them, often leaving you with a situation in which you raced to refill your bombs faster than the enemy could rebuild its superweapon.

4. "Lieutenant, your presence is required in Sector 557 Delta. Stock up on ammunitions before warp as we are facing a menace of colorful insectoid ships. Especially those pesky yellow flagships with their red escorts cause us some real trouble." This mission description fits which famous 1979 title?

Answer: Galaxian

"Galaxian" was the direct predecessor of the even more famous "Galaga" game. Unlike the later versions which had the enemy ships fly into formations, "Galaxian" presented each stage's opponent complement at once, in a complete formation. The difficulty of the game was in the different attack patterns of each ship type that required players to very well watch and predict movements in order not to get caught in an inescapable situation.

The most difficult task in "Galaxian" was to shoot down a doubly escorted flagship, eliminating both escorts first.

5. Congratulations, Commander. You have repelled the invasion. Your next mission is to infiltrate an alien planet. We are certain no one will shoot at you, but be careful not to collide with any of those enemy ships or the walls of those sometimes narrow caves. Oh, and mind your fuel status! Which 1981 game are you playing now?

Answer: Scramble

"Scramble" was one of the first side scrolling games where your ship was on the left side of the screen and you gradually overflew terrain until meeting a boss encounter. Its difficulty was only partially in the enemies, many of which were stationary and posed no threat, but in the tight maneuvering required in particular in the later stages.

Some obstacles could only be passed by being at the very right edge of the screen and then doing a back/up or back/down move to stay within the confines of a narrow vertical corridor.

Interestingly enough, the boss enemy sat on the bottom of a deep pit and was completely defenseless, but the only way to hit it was a tight maneuver back and down as your falling bombs could otherwise not hit it. If you attempted the shot and missed, you were doomed as there was not enough room to get back out of the pit.

6. We'll stick with the alien landscape setting for a moment and send you on a rescue mission: There are ten humanoids living on this planet being attacked by landers trying to abduct and mutate them into attack machines. Rescue them, but make sure you don't get hit by those bombers, swarmers, pods and other nasties the invaders throw at you. Which notoriously difficult 1980 title uses this plotline?

Answer: Defender

"Defender" was a very complex, extremely fast game that took a long time to master. Your controls consisted of up/down movement (with no gravity), thrust (with friction - you stopped when you ceased thrusting), reverse (flip your ship's orientation) and firing. Enemy landers could abduct humanoids, but you could free those by shooting the lander and then catching the fallin figure and returning it to the ground. If the lander completed the abduction, your humanoid was lost and transformed to a mutant - a fast and dangerous attack ship.

7. Far out, Captain! Here's another small, grossly underpowered ship for you to battle some evil aliens with, but if you survive the first few waves, you'll get to dock it with a medium-sized one if you can manage to align them properly. And yet some more waves later, we'll add a third, huge stage to your ship if you do it again. But adding all that hardware will also make you an easy target for any of those aliens trying to ram you (which is their only way to kill you). Which 1980 game are you playing?

Answer: Moon Cresta

"Moon Cresta" was one of the first space shooters to feature a sequence of different attacker stages. Each stage held between four and ten aliens (usually eight) with different movement patterns that were hard to predict. The game had no bosses but six different enemy types and two docking stages.

In these stages, your ship was lifted to the middle of the screen from where it dropped in a weak gravity pull that was disturbed by some occasional right/left pulls. You could control the right/left direction and fire a thruster to decelerate or even gain altitude again. If you docked within 30 seconds, you controlled the merged ship on the next stage for greater firepower, on the other hand, not hitting the docking pad immediately destroyed the ship stage below. If you lost a life, you permanently lost one of the stages, so during the game, you would use several different ship configurations.

8. Admiral, your strategic skill should be enough to handle the Vic Viper now - it's our latest prototype ship and, we admit, a bit weak. But you may collect some powerup items along the way to upgrade it. More engine power will cost you one powerup, a missile weapon two and so on up to an option drone flying with you which costs six. Oh yeah, always remember to shoot the core! Which 1985 title, first in a long series, fits this description?

Answer: Gradius

The "Gradius" concept shaped an entire generation of side-scrolling space shooters. One of its most compelling features was the ship upgrade system: Instead of fixed upgrade items, you collected upgrade points that then could be spent, thus allowing the player a large amount of tactical flexibility. Beyond the three levels already mentioned in the question text, the three and four point upgrades were powerful main guns (which replaced each other, so you could only hold one of them) and the five point upgrade was a shield that deflected some frontal hits aimed at your ship. "Shoot the Core" was conventional wisdom of Gradius players - each of the boss enemies had an invulnerable, often maze-like structure and a small vulnerable core you had to damage and ultimately destroy. Parodius, by the way, is an entry in the Gradius series that poked fun at the original.

While maintaining most of the gameplay, your ship was a flying penguin and you fought such strange opponents as a gargantuan cat masquerading as a pirate ship (complete with tattered sails and eye patch).

9. One last but legendary mission for you before we head home: Sit down in your weakly shielded one-man fighter craft and make your way through a wave of enemy fighters to that moon-sized battle station. Take out some towers on its surface and then dive into a narrow trench, avoiding all obstacles to reach its only weakness - an exhaust shaft less than two meters across. Oh, better hit that one while flying at full speed. Which epic game dating back to 1983 are you playing now?

Answer: Star Wars

Atari's 1983 "Star Wars" recreated Luke Skywalker's Death Star attack from the 1977 movie "Star Wars: A New Hope". Flying as Red 5, you first entered a timed dogfight against Imperial TIE fighters (in which it was quite hard to shoot any opponents at high levels), then you overflew the surface, navigating a maze of firing towers and bunkers and finally entered the trench where horizontal catwalks blocked your way and turrets blanketed the way with damaging fireballs. If a player managed not to shoot his weapons at all during the main trench sequence (up to the point of sighting the exhaust port) and then destroy the Death Star, he received a "Use the Force" bonus of up to 100,000 points. Needless to say, this was a very tough task.

The game achieved very good player immersion via 8-color vector graphics in a decent 3D rendering and the use of original music and digitized audio quotes from the movie.

10. Let's return home a hero. But alas, the solar system is under attack! You don't even get to Neptune before you need to battle enemy forces. This game employs a unique perspective as your ship maneuvers in circles at the edge of the screen and the "up" direction from which all enemies attack is in the center. What 1983 game are we playing as the grand finale of our space odyssey?

Answer: Gyruss

Our final entry in this list played very similarly to "Galaga" in terms of how opponents attacked and also copied the bonus stage concept during which the player had the chance of scoring some massive points from shooting defenseless opponents only making brief flybys.

Its charm resulted from the unique perspective that gave you the impression of looking down a gravity funnel while making your way towards Earth, fighting your way through waves of retreating opponents. The bonus stages were named for the planets - Neptune, Uranus, Saturn. Jupiter, Mars and Earth. Once you reached Earth (which first happened on wave 23), you began anew at the outer edge of the system against even tougher defenses.

The rotaing player movement inspired the name of the game as well, which is, of course, derived from "gyro".

Source: Author WesleyCrusher

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor kyleisalive before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

A Space Odyssey Trivia Quiz

Do you remember the glorious days from 1977 to about 1985 when programmers created hours of enjoyment from a few kilobytes of memory? Here are ten games from the era, carefully chosen to send you into orbit and beyond!

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