We started our history of bar trivia in 2007, when East Coast transplant Daniel Burns brought the idea to Chicago.
You may have joined one of our games and seen how trivia brings people together. But you probably don’t realize how often trivia pops up in daily life. Your local news slips in a fun fact, like what cities let you drink in public. A coworker might mention that tablecloths were once used as communal napkins.. Families gather around the table to play Trivial Pursuit or other quiz games.
Still, when most people think of trivia, they picture a team trivia night at a bar. That tradition traces back to the early history of pub trivia.
History of Bar Trivia: The Beginnings
Pub trivia started in the United Kingdom. Its exact origins remain unclear, but it likely grew out of barroom debates about obscure facts. The connection with Guinness is no accident, as brewery employees created The Guinness Book of World Records in 1951 to settle those arguments.
By the late 1950s, more than 4,000 people joined organized pub trivia events in Merseyside and Lancashire. In 1976, Burns and Porter formalized the idea by launching 32 quiz teams in three leagues. Their pitch was simple: trivia filled slow nights, gave patrons a reason to stay longer, and helped pubs sell more pints.
The idea exploded. Within a few years, Burns and Porter managed more than 10,000 teams. The BBC even began airing quiz-based television programs, cementing trivia’s place in British culture.
Across the Atlantic, bar trivia didn’t yet exist. That would change in the 1980s.
The 1980s: The Rise of Pub Quiz Culture
In 1979, Canadian journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott were drinking at a bar, trying to play Scrabble with a board missing pieces. Instead, they came up with a new idea: a trivia-based board game.
Two years later, Trivial Pursuit hit the market and introduced recreational trivia to millions of Americans. Around the same time, Jeopardy! returned. The show had launched in 1964, ended in 1975, and briefly reappeared in 1979. In 1984, it roared back with Alex Trebek as host — and became a cultural mainstay.
American bar owners saw an opening. Trivia nights gave customers a reason to come out on slow weekdays like Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Bars added themed rounds on movies, music, and sports, which made trivia more exciting and helped it catch on.
The Growth of American Pub and Bar Quizzes
Going into the 90s, Trivial Pursuit was still widely popular, and more and more bars were using trivia as social events to bring in customers.
It’s no surprise that social gathering locations, such as bars and taverns, worked so well for team trivia events. Trivia is, at its heart, social. It encourages lively discussion and, yes, disagreements, but half of the fun comes from going back and forth with friends to find the right answer.
And a few pints to lubricate the conversation doesn’t hurt.
Most bars would host their own individualized trivia nights, with questions written by an employee or a freelance trivia host, but by the 2000s companies that ran standardized trivia events at multiple locations with unique formats and engaging hosts began appearing across the country.
Whaddayaknow? Trivia, for example, was one of the first established Team Trivia companies founded in Chicago in 2008. Since then they’ve hosted hundreds of thousands of events at thousands of locations, and are only seeing the interest in team trivia increasing with every year.
The State of Trivia Today
Pub trivia has now strongly established its value to business owners – and the best part is, it isn’t isolated to just bars. Private events, corporations parties, and social gatherings of all sorts use Team Trivia as an icebreaker, or just a fun way to spend a few hours with coworkers and friends.
While trivia has been around as long as we’ve had history and culture, pub trivia, and general team trivia, has found a way to take knowledge and make it fun for everyone who participates. Be sure to take advantage of our many team trivia events at the venue nearest to you!