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Five years of the Chrome dinosaur, the game that pops up when you go offline

This September marks five years of the Chrome dinosaur, the main character of the minigame that appears in the browser when the device goes offline, leaving the website without loading, and that allows users to distract themselves by jumping cacti and dodging birds.

This game appears in the browser when the user goes offline and is activated when the player presses the spacebar. It is a linear minigame that consists of the dinosaur running non-stop forward and the user will have to use the different controls of the keyboard to avoid the obstacles that appear on the way such as cacti or birds.

There are only two controls, the spacebar to jump and the down arrow to crouch. One of the creators of the dino game, Alan Bettes, says that the goal was for the dinosaur to remember the old games and that, therefore, they established that the character could only have rigid movements.

He says that they thought about including some extra features, such as the dinosaur roaring, but eventually opted for "the basic pillars of any good running game: running, crouching and jumping".

In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, another of its creators, Sebastien Gabriel, said that the dinosaur figure was born in 2012 when he joined the Chrome team, two years before the game was created, as part of the development of a new design for browser error messages.

The game was born in September 2014 "out of an effort to make error pages more enjoyable, useful and interactive," says Gabriel, who explains that "the goal was to reduce user frustration when a request is unsuccessful."

As for why a T-rex dinosaur, Gabriel explains that this decision was made because "it is an animal that has always pleased our common imaginary" and that, in addition, it turns out to be one of the Google pets: "we have the skeleton of a T-rex on our campus, to remind us that we never have to take for granted what we have achieved".

BACK TO PREHISTORY

Developers Edward Jung, Alan Bettes, Sébastien Gabriel and Manuel Clément explain that the minigame is "about returning to the prehistoric age where you didn't have WiFi," as Gabriel points out, who also says that "the cactus and desert environment were part of the first iteration of the 'you're offline' page, while the visual style is a nod to our pixel-style tradition in Chrome's error illustrations."

The chrome game can be used since December 2014 not only on the computer, but also on all Android mobile devices. In fact, Jung says that currently it is played 270 million times a month between computers and mobile, with the majority of its users from countries where mobile data is unreliable and expensive, such as India, Brazil, Mexico or Indonesia.

In addition, Jung says that the success of the game has reached such a point that they have even had to make certain transfers of administration to some companies to be able to deactivate it because it distracted the workers, and the children at school.

Anyway, you don't have to wait to go offline to be able to access the Chrome dinosaur since you can play it by entering the 'url' chrome://dino. In addition, in this mode, an arcade mode is offered that allows you to play in full screen.

The game has evolved over the years since its creation with updates such as the pterodactyl option and night mode. In fact, Bettes claims that, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Chrome, the dinosaur incorporates since the first week of September cake, balloons and a birthday party cap.

Regarding how long it takes to win the game, Jung says that " we built it with a maximum of about 17 million years, the same amount of time that the T-rex was alive on Earth."

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