Alright then. So I was in my computing class and we were about to get underway with the lesson. Slowly everyone came in one by one and sat down at their computer and turned it on. I was funnily enough the first one there and had already turned everything off. By the time I turned chrome on however…there was an error. The Wi-Fi in the school had completely gone down. Everyone in the class was confused and so was our teacher. As soon as he saw the Wi-Fi was down he went out the classroom and left us to it. So it was just us. 18 kids in a classroom seeing the same ‘there is no internet connection’ and the same…dinosaur. Immediately, someone in the class looked at me and knew exactly what we needed to do. He gathered the other boys in the class and all at the same time…we pressed the space bar. The small pixelated dino jumped and that’s when it began. We set up a mini tournament right there and then and so we all tried to get as far as we could. After 5 minutes, I’d already made it to a high score of around 2000 whilst the person next to me, who was essentially my rival at this point, was at around 2100. No one even came close to where we were. We had almost got down everything about the game and could easily predict when we needed to jump and when we didn’t, even out the corner of our eye. Eventually, however, our teacher returned and announced that the Wi-Fi would be turned back on soon. Surprisingly, he was actually impressed with what were able to do in the game, and by the time the lesson finally continued to how it was supposed to be. We were all very very satisfied.

Dino, jumping, no internet, fuck them pterodactyls

This is something I've been aware of for a long time as it's popped up in the Chrome window next to the error message when the browser has gone down or I was experiencing issues with my internet connection. For the most part though I've been largely content to ignore it. It wasn't until randomly discovering this had a Backloggd page that I decided to pull the game up on my own accord and see what it was all about.

Well, it's an endless runner where you play as a little pixelated T-Rex that looks like it was taken off of the Atari 2600 and jump over cactuses in pursuit of a high score. On top of slowly gaining speed the further you go, things will happen as you reach certain point milestones. Such as the appearance of pterodactyls you have to duck under and a change occuring and in the graphics to represent a day and night cycle. The latter of which can seriously mess up your runs as there always seems to be a split second where you're blind to whatever obstacle is coming next.

That's really all there is to it. It's meant to be a simple time-waster while you wait for your computer troubles to work themselves out that you can just so happen to access whenever you want to if you know how. I can see this being addictive with the right kind of gamer due to its simplistic, arcade style gameplay. Personally, all I can say is it exists, it works, and it's competent. A charming oddity that someone programmed into the software that I'll probably go straight back to ignoring.

6/10

top 3 chrome dino runs:
3- on laptop during power cut, c. 2019
2- on pc while turning off wi-fi to be more productive days before exams i hadn’t studied for (lol)
1- on phone with busted 3g while waiting for chinese takeaway, entered trance state with streak only broken when guy RUDELY INTERRUPTED to ask if i wanted complimentary prawn crackers CAN’T YOU SEE I’M GAMING but also YES OFC i want complimentary prawn crackers WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR i mean yes please thank you have a nice day mr sir ^_^