The History of the Chrome Dinosaur Game

Before the game: a dinosaur on an error page

Chrome's "Unable to connect to the Internet" page had shown a small illustration for years. In 2014 the Chrome UX team redesigned the error pages and gave the offline one a pixel-art T-Rex, drawn by designer Sebastien Gabriel. The joke, as he later put it, was that a lost connection sends you back to the "prehistoric ages" — a world without Wi-Fi. For a few months the dinosaur just stood there.

Project Bolan

The team wanted the error page to do something. The internal codename for the project was Project Bolan, after Marc Bolan, frontman of the 1970s band T. Rex, and the idea followed from the name: a T-Rex that runs. Engineer Alan Bettes built it; Gabriel and Edward Jung handled the design. They deliberately kept the animation stiff and the palette to a single gray, to match both the hardware of the dinosaur's era — early 8-bit games — and the joke that the dinosaur was too old to move well. It shipped in Chrome 38 in September 2014, hidden behind a press of the space bar.

Released

September 2014 (Chrome 38)

Codename

Project Bolan

Design

Sebastien Gabriel, Edward Jung

Engineering

Alan Bettes

Monthly plays (2018)

≈ 270 million

Direct URL

chrome://dino

Design decisions that stuck

• One button. Space (and later tap) does everything, because the page has to work with no instructions.
• Endless. There was no budget for levels, and an error page should not become a destination — so the run just speeds up until you lose. The engineers later joked it could run for 17 million years, about as long as the T-Rex existed.
• Fully offline. The whole game — sprites, sounds, code — ships inside Chrome, so it works when nothing else does. It also had to be tiny; the entire runner is a single script.
• Night mode was added later, with the moon and stars, so long runs had something to look at.

From easter egg to one of the most-played games on Earth

Nobody marketed it. People found the dinosaur when their connection dropped, pressed space by accident, and told each other. Chrome later added chrome://dino so the game could be opened deliberately, and on Android the dinosaur became the offline page's tap target. By September 2018 — the game's fourth birthday — Google said it was being played about 270 million times a month, and marked the occasion with an easter egg: a birthday cake on the track, and a party hat for the T-Rex once you collected it.

Its success is also why it gets switched off. Because the game lives inside the browser, schools that manage Chromebooks can disable it with a single policy — the story behind "the owner of this device turned off the dinosaur game" is on the blocked at school page.

Every easter egg so far

• 2018 — Birthday cake. Grab the cake for a party hat and a balloon, for the fourth anniversary.
• 2021 — Olympic edition. Pick up a torch to enter mini-events — hurdles, swimming, equestrian, gymnastics — timed to the Tokyo Games.
• 2024 — GenDino. A Google Labs experiment for the tenth birthday that used Gemini to regenerate the dinosaur, obstacles and scenery from a text prompt.

The game today

The runner is open source as part of the Chromium project, which is why faithful copies — including the one on this site — can run in any browser. The original still lives at chrome://dino in every copy of Chrome, unchanged in the ways that matter: one button, one dinosaur, no ending. Play it here.