Do you use the Chrome browser? Ever found a dinosaur, then? Never hear of the ‘dino’? Well, it’s been around for 4 years now. This T-Rex is friendly & keeps you company when you have lost your Internet connection.
Chrome UX engineer Edward Jung (& his team) on occasion of the 10th anniversary of Chrome recently, spoke on what was the motivation behind Chrome’s offline Dino game.
The hidden game shows itself on the new tab page when Chrome users find themselves offline — press the spacebar,& the dino turns into a runner game.
The Chrome Design team — Edward, as well as Sebastien Gabriel & Alan Bettes spoke of the dinosaur’s journey from the Cretaceous period to the modern browser.
Here are the excerpts:
How did you come up with the idea of running T-Rex?
Sebastien: The idea of “an endless runner” as an easter egg within the “you-are-offline” page was born in early 2014. It’s a play on going back to the “prehistoric age” when you had no Wi‑Fi. The cacti and desert setting were part of the first iteration of the “you-are-offline” page, while the visual style is a nod to our tradition of pixel-art style in Chrome’s error illustrations.
We can imagine that the Chrome Dino got quite popular.
Edward: Yes! There are currently 270 million games played every month, both on laptop and mobile. Not surprisingly, most users come from markets with unreliable or expensive mobile data, like India, Brazil, Mexico, or Indonesia.
It also got to the point where we had to give enterprise admins a way to disable the game because school kids—and even adults who were supposed to be working—really got into it.
Sebastien: We also created the chrome://dino URL, where folks can play the game without going offline. The page offers an “arcade mode” so players can train for the best results in a full-window experience.
Click here to read the rest of the interview.
Image Credit: Google
