The internet has, let’s face it, spoiled us all. Time was, if you wanted to know something like “what does a puma taste like?”, you’d have to hop on a ship bound for the jungles of South America, hunt one down, and eat it yourself. These days, it takes literally fractions of a second: you type the question into Google, hit search, and boom! There’s your answer.
It’s nothing less than a technological miracle – but it comes with a terrible downside. Namely: that feeling of utter helplessness and desolation that only comes from searching for something and discovering – dramatic chord progression please – you’re offline.
Faced with that little pixelated dinosaur, what else can you do but cry and… play a fun little mini-game while you wait for your Wi-Fi to come back online?
Yep. If you use the Chrome browser, chances are you’ve seen the apologetic little dinosaur pop up when the internet is down. But if you thought it was just a static image – as, if the comments under a recent viral TikTok video seem to suggest, many of you did – you’ve been missing out on a decade’s worth of Dinosaur Game.
“The idea of ‘an endless runner’ as an easter egg within the ‘you-are-offline’ page was born in early 2014,” recalled Sebastien Gabriel, a designer at Google and part of the team who originally created the Dinosaur Game, in a 2018 interview for the Google blog.
“It’s a play on going back to the ‘prehistoric age’ when you had no Wi‑Fi,” he explained. “The cacti and desert setting were part of the first iteration of the ‘you-are-offline’ page, while the visual style is a nod to our tradition of pixel-art style in Chrome’s error illustrations.”
The game is very simple: you can only run, duck, and jump, and the goal is to avoid as many cacti and pterodactyls as possible. Eventually, day turns to night; play it long enough, and your dino friend grabs a coat and a coffee as they leave the desert for the city.
In fact, the dinosaur has gone through many such themes over the years. For Chrome’s tenth birthday in 2018, players of Dinosaur Game would find a birthday cake in the desert – eating it would pop a party hat on the dino’s head. During the 2020 Olympics, you could find an Olympic torch, and the normal obstacles would be replaced with Olympic-themed challenges.
While it appears that many people weren’t aware of Dinosaur Game, it’s par for the course from a company renowned for its Easter eggs. The game in particular has proven very popular among veteran Chrome users: in 2018, for example, Google revealed that the game was being played around 270 million times every month on laptop and mobile platforms.
“Not surprisingly, most users come from markets with unreliable or expensive mobile data, like India, Brazil, Mexico, or Indonesia,” noted Chrome UX engineer Edward Jung, who also helped create the game.
“It also got to the point where we had to give enterprise admins a way to disable the game,” he added, “because school kids – and even adults who were supposed to be working – really got into it.”
The good news is that, if you want to play, you don’t need to resort to cutting off your internet connection. “We also created the chrome://dino URL, where folks can play the game without going offline,” Gabriel said. “The page offers an “arcade mode” so players can train for the best results in a full-window experience.”
Which just leaves the question: can the game be beaten? And the answer is… yes. Kind of.
“We built [the game] to max out at approximately 17 million years, the same amount of time that the T-rex was alive on Earth,” Jung told Google. So, yes, it’s technically beatable, he agreed – “but we feel like your spacebar may not be the same afterwards.”
