Arcade Trivia Archive

Reverse-engineering question data from vintage electronic trivia machines, 1983-1987. Plaintext ASCII, base-40 radix, binary trees, 5-bit compression, each game a different puzzle.

108,485 questions
58 games cracked
16 write-ups
The ’80s give or take

The Machines

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1983
1984
Hangman
Hangman — Status Game Corporation
Status Game Corporation 1984

Status Games' letter-guessing spin — the word-game cousin of their trivia cabinets.

893 Q&A → Play all
1985
1986
GEI Trivia Series 13
GEI Trivia Series 13 lost
Greyhound Electronics 1986

Never existed. GEI skipped from 12 to 14 — no ROM dump has surfaced in 40 years of arcade preservation. MAME's driver notes: "no known documented Series 13 questions set."

lost
1987
1988

Write-ups

1983 Cracking Exidy Fax (1983) |Browse the 7,191 Questions How we decoded 3,587 trivia questions from a binary tree compressed into 22 ROM chips
1984 Cracking Trivia Quest (1984) |Browse the 486 Questions Techstar / Sunn's Trivia Quest, one of the earliest English electronic trivia cabinets, stored every question and answer as plaintext ASCII behind a 21-byte pointer-table header. No encryption, no scramble. 489 questions recovered across Trivia and Sports.
1984 Cracking Status Games Hangman (1984) |Browse the 893 Questions The only Status Games title with no phrase table in the ROM, because its trivia chips were leftovers from four other Status games. 893 questions recovered.
1984 Cracking Bally Sente Trivial Pursuit |Browse the 3,487 Questions How we decoded base-40 radix encoding to extract 3,489 Trivial Pursuit questions from 1984 arcade ROMs
1984 Cracking GEI Greyhound Electronics (1984) |Browse the 4,884 Questions Plaintext ASCII, mob connections, and an unsolved compression, 4,884 questions from the original bar trivia machine
1984 Cracking Status Games Trivia (1984) |Browse the 12,463 Questions Add-0x20 character encoding, bit-6 word boundaries, and compressed phrase tokens, 18,801 questions from the statriv2 family
1985 Cracking Progressive Music Trivia (1985) |Browse the 4,194 Questions Enerdyne's music-heavy predecessor to Super Trivia Master, same ettrivia hardware, same LZ-style phrase table, different category mix. 4199 questions recovered across 7 chips, lead-loaded with Movies & TV and Soap Operas.
1985 Cracking Merit Trivia Whiz (1985-87) |Browse the 22,497 Questions How we broke every Merit 6221 trivia game, Trivia Whiz Eds. 1-5 and Tic Tac Trivia, by decoding a 189-entry bigram dictionary, the address-scramble permutation, and a second bitswap LUT hidden in the Z80 program ROM. 34,700 questions recovered.
1985 Cracking Trivia Madness (1985) |Browse the 6,903 Questions M. Kramer Manufacturing's bar-top trivia with two question formats on one board. Long listed as undumped; turned up on archive.org in 2021. 6,910 questions across 8 categories. The board-wide phrase dictionary hid inside a graphics ROM.
1985 Cracking GEI T3 Compression (1986) |Browse the 29,211 Questions Reverse-engineering a Z80 bit-packing scheme to unlock 29,211 questions from GEI Series 8-18 and the gt103 variant pack
1985 Cracking Trivial Pursuit All Star Sports (1985) |Browse the 897 Questions Rearranged ROM chips, a different pointer table, and 897 sports questions from a Bally Sente variant
1986 Cracking MTV Rock-N-Roll Trivia Part 2 (1986) |Browse the 3,283 Questions A Pac-Man conversion kit that turned bar-top cabinets into MTV-licensed rock trivia. 3,284 questions across Heavy Metal, General Rock, Classic Rock, and Rock Videos, compressed with a 103-entry phrase-token dictionary baked into the program ROM.
1986 Cracking Super Trivia Master (1986) Enerdyne's Super Trivia Master hid its questions in an LZ-style self-referential phrase table spread across eight banks, read through a single I/O port. Token decoder reverse-engineered from the Z80 firmware; 4447 questions recovered.
1986 Cracking Bally Sente Name That Tune (1986) How we decoded 1,007 polyphonic melodies, 6-voice arrangements, and drum patches from a 1986 arcade cabinet built around six CEM3394 analog synth chips

Essays

Essay The Funny Bits: What Falls Out When You Finally Read 120,000+ Trivia Questions This whole project is built on a stack of cracked 1980s arcade ROMs and an honest fact: nobody had the time to read all 120,000+ questions before. Now they've been read, and the funny bits, the typos, the sex jokes, the wrong answers, the editorial drift, finally have a witness.
Essay Who Stole From Whom: 2,100+ Plagiarism Hits Across 9 Cabinet Manufacturers After cracking 145,000+ trivia questions out of 1980s arcade ROMs, we ran a cross-cabinet similarity scan. The results read like a courtroom. Exidy and GEI share 228 verbatim questions. Bally Sente, who licensed Trivial Pursuit from Horn Abbot, shares 187 questions with GEI, questions GEI did not license. Status Games turns up everywhere. The bar-trivia industry was running on stolen content.
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