The Ultimate Google Easter Eggs Guide: Games, Tricks, and Secret Codes
By Alexander Ross
The most widely played Easter egg on earth requires pulling your ethernet cable or switching your phone to airplane mode. First introduced in September 2014 by Chrome UX designer Sebastien Gabriel, the Chrome dinosaur game (codenamed "Project Bolan" after Marc Bolan, lead singer of glam-rock band T. Rex) turns network dropouts into an endless desert runner.
Players tap the spacebar to leap over pixelated cacti and duck beneath low-flying pterodactyls. Chrome engineers built the runner as a thematic joke about living in prehistoric times before the dawn of ubiquitous Wi-Fi. The game tracks high scores locally, shifts between day and night palettes as players progress, and only caps out at 17 million years of runtime, a deliberate homage to how long the real Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the planet. You can bypass the offline requirement anytime on desktop or mobile by visiting chrome://dino directly in the omnibox.
Alexander Ross has covered the video game industry for a decade, writing deep dives on game design, esports tournaments, VR developments, and gaming culture.
