What started as a cheeky little easter egg buried in Google Chrome’s error page has quietly become one of the most played endless runners ever made. Dinosaur Game (aka Chrome Dino, T-Rex Game, No Internet Game, pick your favorite alias) drops you into the stubby arms of a tiny pixelated T-Rex stranded in an 8-bit desert, tasked with surviving an endless gauntlet of cacti and divebombing birds. Your only weapon? A spacebar-fueled jump and the iron will to keep going as the game accelerates into absurdity.
Originally coded up in 2014 by Google devs Sebastien Gabriel, Alan Bettes, and Edward Jung, it’s been quietly racking up over 270 million plays a month, whether you’re offline or just pretending to be. The simplicity hides real tension: time your jumps wrong and you’re face-first in a cactus. Mistime a duck and that bird clips your dino’s pixel skull. Hit 99,999 points? Congrats, you’ve maxed out and looped back to zero. Few games turn losing your internet connection into a global reflex challenge, but this little T-Rex pulls it off.
Developer
Chrome UX
Platform
Web browser
