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Science

It seems some of you didn’t know about the dinosaur game


The internet, let’s be honest, has spoiled us all. Back in the day, if you wanted to know something like “what does a puma taste like?” you’d have to board a ship bound for the jungles of South America, hunt one down, and eat it yourself. Nowadays, it literally takes a fraction of a second: you type your question into Google, hit search, and boom! There’s your answer.

It’s nothing short of 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 finding it – dramatic chord progression, please – you are offline.

Faced with that little pixelated dinosaur, what else can you do but cry and… play a fun minigame while you wait for your Wi-Fi to come back online?

Yes. If you use the Chrome browser, you’ve probably seen the little apologetic 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 of Dinosaur Game.

“The idea of ​​an ‘endless runner’ as an easter egg within the ‘you’re-offline’ page was born in early 2014,” recalled Sebastien Gabriel, a Google designer and part of the team that originally created the Dinosaur Game, in a 2018 interview with the Google blog.

“It’s a play on going back to the ‘prehistoric era’ when you didn’t have Wi-Fi,” he explained. “The cactus and desert backdrop was part of the first iteration of the ‘you’re-offline’ page, while the visual style is a nod to our tradition of pixel-art style Chrome error illustrations.”

The game is pretty simple: you just run, duck, and jump, and the goal is to avoid as many cacti and pterodactyls as possible. Eventually, day turns to night; play long enough, and your dinosaur friend grabs a coat and a coffee as they leave the desert for the city.

In fact, the dinosaur has gone through many of these themes over the years. For Chrome’s 10th anniversary in 2018, Dinosaur Game players would find a birthday cake in the desert—eating it would put a party hat on the dinosaur’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 may seem like many people haven’t heard of Dinosaur Game, that’s par for the course for a company renowned for its Easter eggs. The game in particular has proven to be very popular among longtime Chrome users: in 2018, for example, Google revealed that the game was being played around 270 million times per month across laptop and mobile platforms.

“It’s no surprise that 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 corporate administrators a way to disable the game,” he added, “because school-aged kids — and even adults who were supposed to be working — really got involved.”

The good news is that if you want to play, you don’t have to resort to cutting off your internet connection. “We’ve also created the URL chrome://dino, where people can play the game without going offline,” Gabriel said. “The page offers an ‘arcade mode’ so players can practice for the best results in a full-window experience.”

Which leaves only the question: can the game be won? And the answer is… yes. Sort of.

“We built [the game] to max out at approximately 17 million years, the same amount of time T. rex has been alive on Earth,” Jung told Google. So yes, it’s technically beatable, he agreed — “but we feel like your space bar might not be the same afterward.”



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