Bit-tech & Custom PC Pub Quiz: The Full Report

Bit-tech & Custom PC Pub Quiz: The Full Report

80 questions, five marking staff, 120 steam codes, 100 free drink tokens, 34 limited edition bit-tech posters, £2,500 worth of prizes, 1 commemorative cheesecake, four meme templates, one homemade trophy, 76 readers, two months of planning and one Wednesday night in July.

We’re talking, of course, about the first ever bit-tech and Custom PC Pub Quiz which - unless you’ve been living under a console for the past two months - you should know was held last Wednesday at The Phoenix pub in central London. The evening was a festival of tech geekery, with rounds on everything from tech acronyms, to famous game quotes and everything in between.


Before we begin with the report we’d just like to say a massive thank you to Corsair, which sponsored the evening and made the entire event possible. Its team also proved good sports on the night and provided a huge pool of prizes that made a lot of people very happy winners on the day. Also worthy of an honourable mention is Paradox Interactive, which was generous enough to supply us with a pile of Magicka Steam codes, meaning nobody walked away from the evening empty handed.

Anyway, after some brief safety notices (in case of fire, run screaming up the stairs over there) it was time to get started and hand over to our most able of Quiz Masters, Editor of bit-tech, Mr Simon Brew for round one, the In The News Round. If you want to play along, or just test your tech knowledge, then full list of questions and answers can be had here.

We thought a news round would be a relatively simple way to ease everyone into the quiz; the questions were all taken from news stories that had ran on the bit-tech front page after all, how hard could it be? Well, as it turns out, bloody hard; the average score for the round was a measly 4 points!


Nobody seemed to explain this to R.A.G. (which, it’s worth noting was one of the teams we put together on the night) however, as they launched into an instant lead, even getting the tricky question about who recent purchased struggling memory manufacturer Elpida right. One question in this round out foxed everyone in the room however - if you can name the brand name that Intel are shipping their Larrabee based accelerator cards under, give yourself a pat on the back.

Just behind R.A.G. were the brilliantly titled Our Cheesecake Brings All The Geeks To The Yard (OCBATGTTY from now on) and 192.168.X.X, while languishing at the bottom was the poor old 8-bit Heroes and Team Corsair. Each of these quickly had the chance to catch back up though, in round 2 - the Tech TV & Film Round.


This round proved significantly easier for most of the teams; we saw some big scores of eight and nine. One of the lower scorers was the previously mighty R.A.G, who very generously decided to give some other teams a chance to see the view from the top of the table; both All Your Beers are Belong to Us and OCBATGTTY took them up on the offer.

All but one team recognized the film where Hugh Jackman played a computer hacker (clearly too easy) but nobody could name two of the four stats Scott Pilgrim gains for earning the Power of Self Respect (clearly too hard). It also warmed our hearts to see eight teams correctly answer that Tim ends up playing Resident Evil all night in episode three of Spaced as we thought that that would be way too niche; you guys are ace.