Quiz Whiz

This is one of the best retro gifts you could buy someone who loved the 1970's and 80’s – though it’s not available now, obviously! (Though I think it is still available second hand on ebay...)

Basically Quiz Whiz was an Electronic game – which made it brilliant to my young mind – Four people could play at the same time. A bit like trivial pursuit (without the board game aspect), you answered 1980’s based questions and the winner was the one who got the most right (obviously).

The Quiz Whiz had lots of different Cartridges,1001 Questions, Movies and TV, Guiness Book of World Records, and even more left field ones like: Sherlock Holmes & Other Famous Mysteries, or Monsters, Vampires, Witches and Ghosts - I would have loved those ones! However, my friend only had 2 cartridges – the 1001 questions (1 and 2) – but that was enough to keep us going for ages – Can you remember the answers to 1001 questions? Me neither, so the cartridges never ran out. His older brother wiped to floor with us (in the game and also in general!), probably because he’d simply experienced more of the 1970's and 80’s than we had.

Quiz Whiz was made in 1981 by “Coleco”, an American Company started in 1932. Though it became most successful in the 1980s by producing Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and its video game consoles. In fact they did even better than the Quiz Whiz! They made handheld versions of Donkey Kong and Ms. Pacman.

One good thing about Quiz Whiz was that it was educational! Well, if 1980’s pop culture was on the syllabus we would have been going great guns! But you did learn a lot. And you didn’t know you were learning either because it was an electronic game which was fun! A sneaky way of getting us kids to learn stuff.