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Bow down to the Quiz Wiz

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Bow down to the Quiz Wiz

Retroist
Apr 1, 2010
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I was an obsessive fact reader as a kid and loved games and quizzes so I really wanted a “Quiz Wiz”. I never did get one, but I got a nice set of Funk & Wagnall Encyclopedia that served me all the way through High School.

Released in 1979 by Coleco, the Quiz Wiz was a portable electronic quiz game that ran off a single 9V battery. The interface was simple. A numberic keypad, 4 letter keys, and an Answer and Clear button for inputting your answer, then a Yes or No indicator for if you got the answers correct or not.

Questions came from paired books and cartridges that you plugged into you Quiz Wiz. It came with one called “1001 Questions,” but Coleco released several more. The list of quizzes is pretty impressive. I can see several I would want, especially Monsters, Vampires, Witches, and Ghosts.

  1. 1001 Questions

  2. The World of Sports

  3. Movies and TV

  4. People and Places

  5. Trivia

  6. Music and Books

  7. Math Mania

  8. The Book of Lists

  9. Greatest Sports Legends

  10. Super Heroes

  11. Disaster! When Nature Strikes Back

  12. The Ocean – Mankind’s Last Frontier

  13. Energy – The Fuel of Life

  14. How Things Work- Aerosols to Zippers

  15. NBA Teams

  16. NFL

  17. MLB

  18. Guiness Book of World – Volume 1

  19. Guiness Book of World – Volume 2

  20. Sherlock Holmes & Other Famous Mysteries

  21. Greatest Sports Legends – Volume II

  22. Monsters, Vampires, Witches and Ghosts

  23. Words – Used, Misused and Confused

  24. Super Trivia – Movies and TV

  25. Rock N Roll – Doo Wop to Disco

  26. The Bible – The Old and New Testaments

  27. Soap Opera Digest

  28. Ripley’s Believe it or Not

  29. Celebrity Trivia

  30. Fascinating Facts about Animals

The advertising campaign was memorable. Here is one of the original commercials for the game.

In the the nineties, Tiger Electronics revived the Quiz Wiz. The technology looked slightly updated, but overall it looked to be the same gaming system. Naturally since it was the nineties, the advertising, which featuring “The Wise Guy” was a just a little but more “extreme.”

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