The Impossible Quiz made me rage quit — and learn to collaborate

polygon.com:

Computer lab was one of my favorite classes when I was a kid, for exactly the reason you might expect. In between typing tests and learning how to use Microsoft Word we had free time, and that meant one thing: Flash games.

Flash was our bread and butter and the foundation for a lot of our favorite games, from Poptropica to Club Penguin and Webkinz. When the sites hosting those ultimately got banned from the school computers because we spent too much time on them, we moved on to Flash compilation sites, like Cool Math Games. There were a lot of class favorites like Fireboy and Watergirl and Crazy Taxi. But what really grabbed our attention was The Impossible Quiz.

Computer Lab Week is our ode to the classic “school” games, like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers, that kept us from being productive. Sure, you should be doing homework, but Carmen Sandiego is on the loose!

The Impossible Quiz consisted of 110 questions. What made it “impossible” was that the questions were obtuse and riddle-like. For example, the second question was “Can a match box?” It’s a multiple choice question with the answers “Yes,” “No,” “Yes, one beat Mike Tyson,” and the correct answer, “No, but a tin can.” If you got an answer wrong, a loud bomb sound played and the game took away one of your three lives. At some points you could earn arrows that let you skip questions. The game also featured a lot of poop jokes, which was perfect for our blossoming edgy minds.

Looking back, it’s clear to me that this was the first “rage” game I had ever encountered. A quiz was supposed to be logical and have answers that made sense. But The Impossible Quiz operated on its own brand of logic. The quiz was intentionally antagonistic to the player, like Getting Over