About The Game

The Dinosaur Game (Chrome Dino) first appeared in Google Chrome in 2014. It was built by Google's Chrome UX team — designers Sebastien Gabriel and Alan Bettes, together with engineer Edward Jung. During development the project carried the codename "Project Bolan", a nod to Marc Bolan, frontman of the 1970s glam-rock band T. Rex.

The game debuted in September 2014, but the first build ran poorly on older Android phones, so the code was rewritten and re-released in December of the same year.

Over time the dino picked up new tricks. A 2015 browser update added flying pterodactyls (technically pterosaurs) as a second type of obstacle — they start appearing once you pass roughly 450 points. A little later the night mode arrived: as your score climbs (the first switch happens around 700 points) the desert flips to a dark palette, and from there the day-night cycle keeps repeating.

There's good news for record-chasers, too. Starting with Chrome 72 (early 2019), your high score is finally saved between sessions and even syncs across your devices through your Chrome profile. Before that update, every score vanished the moment you closed the tab.

Google has kept adding playful touches since. In July 2020, to mark the Tokyo Olympics, a special Easter egg was introduced: when the dino reaches a torch it transforms into different Olympic disciplines — swimming, running, hurdles and more — with the usual cacti and pterodactyls swapped for sport-themed obstacles. In 2021 Google added home-screen widgets (first on iOS, then on Android) that launch chrome://dino in a single tap. And in 2024, for the game's 10th anniversary, Google released GenDino — an experimental version that let you type a prompt and generate the dinosaur and its world with AI-generated sprites (it was a limited-time release).

The little T-Rex has long outgrown the error page: it's the Chrome team's unofficial mascot, and it even made a cameo in the opening "couch gag" of The Simpsons' season 34 premiere.

Impact on the game industry

The popularity of Dino T-Rex prompted developers of other browsers to create similar games in their software. In 2020, Microsoft added the Surf game to Microsoft Edge — players ride a surfboard across the waves, dodging obstacles and kraken tentacles. Later that same year, Vivaldi launched its own arcade game, called Vivaldia.

The game is also famously easy to "hack". Open the browser console on the offline page, and a few commands let you switch the dinosaur into "god" mode — it keeps running through obstacles as if nothing happened. Similar tricks let players set the score to almost any value or slow the game down.

In August 2020, the dino got a small arsenal of weapons, time-slowing pills, and other add-ons in a modified version called Dino Swords — a collaboration between MSCHF and 100 Thieves. A word of warning: some of those weapons can backfire on the dino itself.

There are plenty of fan-made versions, too. One is Modiji, which swaps the original hero for India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The community has also rebuilt the runner in full 3D — open-source projects such as Abraham "Priler" Tugalov's dino3d move the camera behind a voxel dinosaur and add depth and background music, while keeping the classic run-jump-duck loop intact.

A Reddit user named The_Terrain once shared an image of the Chrome T-Rex recreated inside the world of Minecraft — proof that a matching mod could well be on the way.