The history of Green Day started a long time ago in Rodeo, California when the young friends Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt (born Michael Ryan Pritchard) formed their first band Sweet Children when they were 14 years old.

Their first show was in 1988 at Rod's Hickory Pit in Rodeo, California, where Armstrong's mother was working. A couple months later, they played a high school party with the Lookouts in a remote mountain location near Willits, California, where Tre Cool (current drummer of Green Day) and Kain Kong of the Lookouts lived and attended school. Only five kids showed up for the party, and there was no electricity in the house, so Sweet Children had to play using a generator and candlelight.

In 1989 the group got the drummer Al Sobrante (John Kiffmeyer) and changed its name to Green Day, allegedly choosing the name for their fondness of marihuana.

The same year they released their first EP 1 000 Hours, which brought the band more fans, more gigs and eventually a record deal. They got signed to an independent label, Lookout! Records, which released their first 2 albums.

One year later, in April of 1990, Green Day released their first album, '39/Smooth' (re-issued on CD in 1991, with 9 additional tracks, as '1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours') Shortly after this release, there was another change: Al Sobrante left the band on what was supposed to be a temporary basis to attend college in Arcata, California, and was replaced by Tre Cool (current drummer, who at the age of 12 was member of The Lookouts).

In January of 1992, came their second album Kerplunk, which sold about 50,000 copies in the U.S.The CD version also included the four tracks from the 'Sweet Children' EP. This one led to a wave of interest from major record labels.

Their major label debut Dookie became a breakout success in 1994 and eventually sold over 10 million copies in the U.S. alone and 12 million internationally (although its follow-up, Insomniac, only sold a quarter of its predecessor). Thanks to MTV support for the initial single, "Longview," Dookie became a major hit. At the end of the summer, the band stole the show at Woodstock '94, which helped the sales of Dookie increase. As a result, Green Day was widely credited, along with fellow California punk bands The Offspring and Rancid, with reviving mainstream interest in and popularizing punk rock in the United States. The band has sold over 60 million records worldwide.

Insomniac came out in 1995 and sold over 2 million copies by spring of the next year.

Nimrod came out in 1997 and was well received by both fans and critics. It sold 80,000 copies in the first week after the release, and is still considered one of the best albums ever released by the band.Nimrod wasn’t a huge success in sales, but it gained a lot more respect towards the band than any of their previous albums.

In 2000, Warning was released.

Fighting burnout after Warning, the band went into the studio to write and record new material for an album (tentatively titled "Cigarettes and Valentines"). After completing 20 tracks - an impressive album according to those few who heard it - the master tapes were stolen from the studio. This moved them not to re-create the lost tracks, but to create so much better new ones.

The resulting 2004 album, American Idiot, debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, the band's first ever album to reach #1, backed by the success of the album's first single, "American Idiot."