Gameplay

The Dinosaur Game is simple, and that’s exactly where its charm lies. You control a pixelated T-Rex as it runs automatically from left to right. Your goal is to help the T-Rex dodge obstacles like cacti and flying pterodactyls. Press the spacebar (or tap the screen on mobile) to jump, and hold the down arrow to duck. The longer your T-Rex survives, the higher your score climbs.

How Popular Is the Offline Dinosaur Game?

Once you reach around 700 points, the background switches from white to black, marking the shift from day to night. The color scheme keeps changing the further you go.

According to Chrome UX engineer Edward Jung, around 270 million games are played every month across different devices. Most players come from places with expensive or unreliable data, including Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Mexico. That’s no surprise, since the Chrome Dinosaur Game normally only appears when the internet is down.

The game has seen plenty of updates and improvements over the years, and one of the most memorable was the addition of night mode in 2016, which made it both better-looking and more challenging.

What Inspired the Dinosaur Game?

It’s hard to pin down exactly what inspired the Google Dinosaur Game. What’s clear, though, is that it arrived during the golden age of endless runners like Flappy Bird and Temple Run. Microsoft Edge even made its own version — an update to Surf, where you guide a surfer collecting power-ups while dodging obstacles. Just like the offline Dinosaur Game, you can reach it two ways: when the browser is offline, or by going to edge://surf.

An Endless Runner That Actually Ends

Despite being billed as an endless runner, the Dinosaur Game does in fact have an ending. It’s considered complete once you reach a score of 99,999 — but that’s an almost impossible feat. Only a handful of players have ever gotten there, so if you’re one of them, you’re in very rare company.

The maximum score was designed to take roughly 17 million years of playtime to reach — a nod to how long the T-Rex roamed the Earth before it went extinct.