The Impossible Quiz

Sample question^[1]

"''WRONG! -1 LIFE"

How to describe this game? Hrm...well, what I Wanna Be the Guy is to platformers, The Impossible Quiz is to quiz games.

You can play the game here. Its sequel, The Impossible Quiz 2, is here. The first two chapters of the episodic Impossible Quiz Book can be found here and here. If the finished games are too hard, try the prototype version here.

Tropes used in The Impossible Quiz include:

• April Fools' Day: The Impossible Quiz 3. Try updating your Flash player.
  • The Impossible Quizbook Chapter Two trailer. Hope you know how to work a ZX Spectrum.
• Ascended Extra: Chris, who was a nameless cat in TIQ1 used for a single question, gained star status in the sequels.
• Check Point Starvation: There are no check points in any of the games, and one of the questions from the second mocks the player for wanting one.
• Chekhov's Gun: The gimmick behind the Impossible Quizbook Chapter Two trailer above figures into the actual chapter. If you don't know how to solve it, you won't be able to continue the quiz.
  • Your skips, in the original. If you don't keep them all until the end, you can't win. Which is why that (As stated in the instructions from the sequel) they are actually useless.
• Death by Genre Savviness: After you do some questions and understand how logic works in this game, later questions will appear to have tricks, but are supposed to be taken at complete face value.
  • "PRESS THIS BUTTON TO KILL YOURSELF BEFORE THE BOMB DOES!"
• Engrish
• Everythings Cuter With Kittens: Chris the Cat.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Subverted. They're near-impossible, but seem to be completely so until you master them.
• Face Palm: Chris does this on game over in Impossible Quizbook chapter 2.
• Fission Mailed: At least once per quiz.
• Game Breaking Bug / Guide Dang It: One of the questions makes you forces you to get your cursor from one island to another without touching the water. At the time the game was made, right clicking will bring up a drop down menu that works as a overlay, as a "bridge" to the other island. However, because of some update to flash that has come since, the dropdown no longer functions as an overlay, meaning that other exploits have to be used meaning the question is impossible to solve the normal way. It is possible to solve: click your mouse buttons and drag your mouse to the other island with the mouse button still clicked in. Or using alt-tab with plenty of open stuff [at least 10 to make a bridge).
• Gameplay Roulette: Among the more traditional-style questions, you are frequently thrown into minigames where you have to click on things, navigate a maze, etc.
• Guide Dang It
• Hurricane of Puns: Some of the correct answers in the quizzes are puns.
• Insane Troll Logic: Some of the tests run on this.
• Luck-Based Mission / Final Exam Boss: The last question on Impossible Quiz 2.
• Mind Screw: The game frequently switches between three main methods of answering: Yes, Baaah, and Abandon all hope, ye who enter here! It also has a few other settings that come up all of once.
• Nintendo Hard: WRONG! -1 LIFE
• No Fair Cheating: Press Tab in any of the games after the prototype.
• Nostalgia Level: A random question from the first quiz (e.g. the "What flavor is cardboard?" one) is reused in the second quiz, complete with the exact same button design.
  • Then, on question 117, it reproduces a question from the Impossible Quiz prototype, again with the same graphic design. Considering that at the time few people even knew of the prototype's existence, this threw a lot of people for a loop.
  • The Impossible Quiz Book: Chapter 1 features a question from one of the previous quizzes, and one of the possible answers is "Wait a minute... this question is familiar...". It's so wrong, isn't it?
• Obvious Rule Patch: In early releases of the first quiz, people would cheat their way through question 106 by right-clicking and then waiting until it got to the end. Later versions patched it so that now right-clicking on that question kills you.
• Press X to Not Die: Press Tab 50 times! On second thought, don't do it, you'll DIE!
• Retraux: Questions 61-70 of The Impossible Quizbook are loaded and styled like a ZX Spectrum program.
• Revenge of the Sequel: One of several unofficial Fan Sequels: Save the Death Star from premature destruction in the Revenge Against the Impossible Quiz. Set in 2007 and during the events of the 2007 Death Star novel, but before A New Hope.
• Running Gag:
  • Blue, red, blue, yellow. Can you remember it?
  • LOL 69 (actually used as one of the possible last questions to The Impossible Quiz 2) In Question 69 of Chapter 2 you literally click the question number 69 times.
    • Lemurs (They were even mentioned 5 times in "The Impossible Quiz 2").
• Schmuck Bait: One question in The Impossible Quiz Book has an answer labeled "Please don't press this."
  • From the original: "IF YOU PRESS THIS BUTTON, IT'S GAME OVER..." "Alternatively, Click This Button to carry on"
• Series Mascot: Chris the Cat.
• Shout-Out: To various Internet memes, 4Chan, and Splapp-me-do's own movies -- the minigames where you help Dr. Eggman break Sonic the Hedgehog's leg (in the first quiz) and help Amy Rose commit suicide (in the second) come from the Flash movie Sonic Breaks his Neck, for example.
  • Question 108 of the original is also a Shout-Out to Lost, as it requires you to enter the numbers into the hatch computer before the time runs out. If you fail, you get a Nonstandard Game Over which is very similar to what happened when the characters actually failed to enter the numbers.
  • The intro of The Impossible Quizbook Chapter 2 informs you that you can press S to skip or press X to Jason.
• Surreal Humour
• This Is Sparta: One of the answers in the second game. King Leonidas even comes out and says it.
• Timed Mission: Bomb questions; run out of time and it's an immediate Game Over regardless of how many lives you have.
• Trial and Error Gameplay
• Unwinnable by Design: Using EVEN ONE SKIP makes you unable to pass the final question in the first game.
• Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The last 10 questions of the first quiz and the last 20 of the second have different music and presentation than the questions that preceded them. They are more difficult and all timed.
• Violation of Common Sense: Several questions require you to disregard common sense to pass, such as a question that reads "Press this button to kill you before the bomb does." It was referring to the words "this button" in the question. If you click "this button", YOU DIE. The actual correct answer is to push the threatening-looking button.
• Visual Pun: In one question the screen tells you, "if only you had a bridge". (The idea is to right-click and bring up the browser's context menu, so you can mouse over to the target area without touching the borders)
• What Does This Button Do?: Leads to many correct answers in the early game, and then it gets Zig Zagged.

---

GAME OVER Try again? / I Give Up

1. ↑ It's the 42nd 42