Dinosaur Game

The Dinosaur Game was created by members of Google’s Chrome UX team in 2014. It was designed to appear automatically whenever users lose their internet connection. Instead of staring at a blank error page, people suddenly found a cute pixel T-Rex waiting for them. Pressing the spacebar brought the game to life, and the offline world felt a little less frustrating.

Interestingly, the game’s prehistoric theme was chosen to represent the “Stone Age” of having no internet. According to the developers, the concept was meant to be funny: if you lost your connection, you were temporarily thrown back into ancient times—with a dinosaur to keep you company.

This clever idea quickly caught on. Players began sharing screenshots of their high scores, websites created online versions of the game, and the dinosaur became a symbol of the early web experience.