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.
