Dinosaur Game, also known as the Chrome Dino or Offline Dino Game, is a game built into the Google Chrome web browser since 2014 that can be accessed in normal usage when opening a new tab or trying to load a page while the internet is inaccessible. The game can be accessed in Chrome without turning off your internet by typing either chrome://dino or chrome://network-error/-106 into the address bar.
Being a game built into a browser, the gameplay is simple- after starting the game by tapping the spacebar, you play as a T. Rex running across a side-scrolling world, and tap the spacebar to make it jump over cacti and pterodactyls while your score ticks up in the corner, hoping that the internet will come back. When the score hits 500 points (relatively early into the game), pterodactyls at varying points will show up, and at the 600 point mark, the screen changes from black to white in a day/night cycle.
This game contains examples of:
- Artistic License – Paleontology:
- The T. rex resembles the now out-of-date "tripod" reconstructions of therapods, instead of the more modern ones that have the tails, bodies and heads parallel to the ground.
- Cacti didn't evolve until around 30 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct. T. Rex and some pterosaur species did live at the same time, though.
- Death from Above: If your device's administrator has disabled this game, the dinosaur will instead appear with the same wide-eyed expression as when you get a Game Over as meteors fall in the background.
- Easter Egg: During the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, colored Olympic torches could appear in the game, and when collected, the game would reskin itself to match a random Olympic event, and the "GAME OVER" would be replaced with "またプレイしてね" (Mata purei shite ne), which translates to "Please Play Again". Reskins included gymnastics, swimming, hurdle jumping, surfing (and dodging sharks), and horse jumping, complete with the horse.
- Endless Running Game: The gameplay consists solely of the T. Rex running from left to right and jumping over or ducking under obstacles. It turns out that the game was designed to run for 17 million real-time years, referencing how long the T. Rex existed before it went extinct.
- Huge Rider, Tiny Mount: One of the special 2020 Tokyo Olympics reskins has the T. Rex competing in the horse jumping event, while riding a horse that's smaller than it. The horse, of course, runs as fast as the T. Rex under normal conditions. It looks pretty goofy.
- In-Universe Game Clock: It kicks in once your score has reached 600 points- the screen will suddenly change from its usual dark gray to white, representing daytime, and it will continue to rotate like that between night and day roughly every 100 points.
- Interface Screw: The game cycles between a dark mode and light mode every 100 score points in a day/night cycle, blinding you until your eyes adjust. At even slightly fast speeds, this results in the game changing between day and night multiple times per minute, about as quickly as it takes your eyes to adjust to the change in light. It's probably the hardest aspect of the game after the speed.
- Temporary Online Content: There is no known way to play any of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics reskins after the Olympics ended. Fortunately, the reskins were almost solely cosmetic in nature with no real effect on gameplay.
