Ten years ago, Branden Peters looked around Atlanta’s nightlife and saw overpriced VIP sections, plumes of hookah smoke, and a culture that felt more pretentious than fun.
What he didn’t see was a third space where hip-hop lovers could gather around the music that raised them, enjoy themselves, and put their knowledge to the test.
So, along with Maurice Garland and Bernard Adusei (better known as DJ Dusei Da Great), Peters set out to create Facts Only Trivia, a hip-hop trivia event.
“There wasn’t anything here quite like this,” Peters told Capital B Atlanta. “Bar trivia existed, but nothing that was fun or spoke to our community.”
This week, their event celebrated its 10th anniversary at Westside Motor Lounge, where more than 70 music enthusiasts competed for giveaways and a combined $500 in cash prizes.
Across five rounds, five-question sets range from obvious to obscure. One moment, players are penciling in Kendrick Lamar’s hometown; the next, an attendee is performing Slick Rick’s 1988 classic “Children’s Story” from memory. Last month, there was a “Stanky Legg” dance battle.
The mood, by design, never gets too serious.
“Throwing jokes out there and [keeping] it lighthearted, it’s very intentional,” said Garland, who co-hosts alongside Peters. “We don’t want people leaving like, ‘Damn, I failed the test.’ We want them to feel like they had a good time … whether you get stuff right or wrong.”
That low-stakes vibe has helped make Facts Only Trivia a local institution, cultivating a community of rap fans from Gen X to Gen Z.
Marlon Delancy, a teacher who relocated to Atlanta from Florida in 2007, said he had been searching for something like Facts Only Trivia before he began showing up more than three years ago.
“We all enjoy … what trivia brings — it opens up the social [aspect],” said Delancy, 44, who took home Wednesday’s second-place prize after teaming up with another player who arrived solo. “If you sit down and people join your table and you have a conversation, that’s all cool, whether it’s the last time you see them or you see them again the next month.”
Brentia Caldwell-Smith, a 39-year-old therapist who has been attending since the early days, echoes the sentiment.
“You see the same faces each time, and then new ones trickle in,” the Colorado Springs, Colorado, native said. “I bring my friends, I bring my husband. It’s community. It’s fun.”
Facts Only Trivia first took shape after Peters, a culture and lifestyle journalist, learned of hip-hop duo Tanya Morgan hosting a similar event in Brooklyn, New York, and realized Atlanta deserved its own version. The Bay Area transplant had already been co-hosting the Day 1 Radio podcast with fellow veteran music journalist Garland. Marketing strategist Crystal Thomas suggested looping in Dusei Da Great, who DJs for rapper Big K.R.I.T.
The free game night — originally a weekly event called Hip-Hop Trivia ATL — debuted in May 2016 at Slice, a now-defunct pizzeria on Georgia State University’s campus. Within the first month, André 3000 showed up, pencil and paper in hand.
“We knew we had something, because people were clamoring for it,” Peters said.
Facts Only Trivia moved through several venues, from Jack’s Pizza and Wings to 656 Sports Bar and Grille, retaining its loyal following along the way. In 2020, the pandemic pushed it online to Zoom and quiz platform Kahoot!, opening the event to players from beyond the Peach State. Adusei remembers one session drawing 400 participants.
“I’ve seen people on Eventbrite try to mimic it,” said Kool Kila, a 53-year-old radio executive and Oklahoma native who moved to Atlanta in 2001. “But the hosts — who they are and what they know — make it legit.”
The rebrand to Facts Only Trivia (a reference to a lyric from Jay-Z’s 2013 song “La Familia”) took place in 2023, when the event moved to The Collective Food Hall at Coda. It has been hosted at Westside Motor Lounge in Bankhead — T.I.’s old stomping grounds — since last year.
Peters said he, Garland, and Adusei have compiled a database of “thousands of questions” over the years. They pull them each month based on theme, difficulty, and timeliness.
“It’s not cookie-cutter,” said Delancy, who also joined a winning team his very first time playing.
Adusei sets the vibes by blending current and old-school songs that often reflect the night’s theme. “It’s good to go back to music that made you dance or made you laugh at the lyrics,” he said. “Bringing that aspect was definitely important.”
For Antonio Cleveland, a Zone 6 native who has been coming since the early days, Facts Only Trivia represents something bigger than a trivia night.
“It’s that last little bit of old Atlanta that we got left,” said 44-year-old Cleveland, one-half of Wednesday night’s first-place winning team. “The city has changed so much, but we’re on some grown-and-sexy-type stuff here.”
Peters said he is in awe of the community he helped build; he said at least one woman met her future husband at one of his trivia nights. And now, after a decade, the Facts Only Trivia founders are thinking about how to scale while preserving the magic that turns newcomers into regulars.
“I think we keep it fresh by realizing that even though we’ve been doing it for 10 years, it’s always going to be new to somebody,” said Garland, noting the vast untapped audience in Atlanta. “That’s one of the things that keeps us motivated.”
“We’re not going to go the grass-wall route at any point, ever,” said Peters, who adds that they’ve considered trekking to other cities, as they did in Houston last year. “It’s about keeping it authentic and always remembering why we started this.”
After the trivia wrapped around 10 p.m., attendees spilled from the Westside Motor Lounge event space into the main bar for special anniversary DJ sets by Sean Falyon and DJ Wally Sparks. First-place winner Kelly Ramsey lingered outside, reflecting on what Facts Only Trivia has meant to him since he began attending during its stint at Slice.
“Me and my dog have been doing the club forever, [but] coming in here gives us something different,” said the 43-year-old Decatur native. “We have something we can vibe to, jam to, dance to, rap to, drink to … and still get home, go to sleep, and be straight in the morning.”
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