🦖 Dinosaur Games

When Chrome cannot reach a website it draws a small grey tyrannosaurus, and if you press the space bar it starts running. It was added to Chrome in 2014, and the flat grey was chosen on purpose: it is the colour of an error page, so the joke only works when something has gone wrong. Google has said the design nods to the idea of "prehistoric times" — no connection, no modern world.

It became one of the most played games ever made almost by accident, and it turned "dinosaur game" into a search term that means something very specific to a whole generation: a side view, a cactus, one button. Half the dinosaur games in this catalogue are that game, rebuilt by someone else, and the page starts with the closest ones.

The four kinds of dinosaur game

Runners. One button, a side view, obstacles that arrive faster. The Chrome lineage. They are also the lightest things here and the ones that work best on a phone.

Puzzles, and this is the surprise: puzzle is the largest single category on this page. Jigsaws, matching pairs, sliding tiles — dinosaurs are a subject for a picture as much as a character in a game, and for small children they are the safest half of the genre.

Hunts and rampages, which split into shooting them and being them. Being them is more fun and there are fewer of them.

Park builders, where the dinosaurs are stock to be fed, penned and transported, and the game is about logistics with teeth.

They are heavier than they look

The median dinosaur game here downloads 7 MB, against 6.5 for the catalogue as a whole, and only five of the sixty-eight are marked as working on touch.

That combination is a fingerprint. Dinosaurs pull developers towards 3D — a tyrannosaurus is a thing you want to walk around, not a sprite — and 3D in a browser means a model, textures, an engine, and a mouse. The runners are the exception and they are the ones you can play on a phone.

If you came here for something to play on a phone on the bus, start with the runners and the jigsaws. If you are on a laptop, the hunts and the park games are where the 3D went.

Where the dinosaurs are, and where they are not

We keep horror and blood off this page, which removes the handful of games that treat a velociraptor as a monster in a corridor. What stays includes hunting games with rifles, because excluding those would leave a page that misrepresents the genre.

For the younger end, the collection for younger children is hand-picked and every game on it was looked at by a person. For more of the same shape of game, the animal games shelf is the wider shelf this one sits on.