Best Chrome Dino mods, hacks, and variations

The Chrome Dino game is open source — the Runner code lives inside the Chromium repository and has been extracted, forked, and reimagined many times. Some forks are joke-tier. Some are surprisingly polished. Here’s the modding scene worth knowing about.

Play it here: Want variants without installing mods? Play Dino Game Night Mode, Dino Game 3D, 2 Player Dino Game or Dino Run free on Dinogame.

Open-source forks

wayou/t-rex-runner

The most-used extraction. Pulls the Runner code out of Chromium and wraps it in a minimal HTML/CSS/JS bundle that runs standalone. BSD-3 licensed. This is what we use on dinogame.gg — the original game engine, with a small wrapper so it loads on a hosted page instead of an offline error.

If you want to host the game yourself, this is the fork to start with.

Python and pygame remakes

Rewriting the Dino game in Python with pygame is a popular beginner project, and many versions are public on GitHub. They run on the desktop as a native window rather than a browser tab, and the code is usually small enough to read in an afternoon. Treat them as learning projects rather than faithful copies — physics and timing vary from one remake to the next.

Machine-learning playgrounds

Plenty of open-source projects train an agent to play the Dino game, often by driving a browser with an automation tool and feeding screen captures to a small neural network. Not state-of-the-art ML, but a clean starter project if you want to mess with game-playing agents. More on the approaches below.

Visual mods

Custom sprite swaps

The Runner code reads its graphics from a sprite sheet image — <img id="offline-resources-1x">, or offline-resources-2x on high-density screens. Replace that PNG and you’ve reskinned the entire game. Common fan reskins:

Character swaps — a different animal, mascot or meme character in place of the T-Rex, drawn on the same pixel grid.
Themed obstacles — cacti redrawn as anything from traffic cones to bones.
Dark mode — invert the palette so the game looks like the night state (which normally flips in every 700 points) permanently.
Retro-console tributes — fan reskins styled after classic platformers.

None of these change gameplay — the sprite is purely cosmetic. Hitboxes are defined in the source as collision boxes, not read from the image, so a reskin with a very different silhouette can feel unfair.

Gameplay mods and console hacks

The safest “hacks” need no download at all. Open chrome://dino, press F12, go to the Console tab and type commands against the running game object. They only affect the tab you’re in and vanish when you reload.

Invincibility

Runner.instance_.gameOver = function(){} replaces the game-over function with an empty one, so collisions no longer end the run. The T-Rex runs straight through cacti. Fun for a minute; it also makes the score meaningless.

Speed and jump tweaks

The engine exposes setters such as Runner.instance_.setSpeed(number) and Runner.instance_.tRex.setJumpVelocity(number). Raise or lower the numbers to see how much of the game’s feel comes from two values. Chrome updates can rename internals, so if a command errors, the code has moved.

Multiplayer Dino

Several forks have built two-player versions where two T-Rexes share the same playfield with different keybinds. The fun is the kibitzing, not the competition. If you’d rather not install anything, our 2 Player Dino Game does this on one keyboard.

A word of caution: skip any site or download promising a “Dino hack tool,” score injector or executable. The game is a single JavaScript file; nothing about modding it requires installing a program. For a longer catalog of fan projects, see our Chrome Dino fan mods list.

AI bots

The Dino game is small enough to be a good test case for game-playing AI. Three approaches you’ll see online:

Genetic algorithms — a population of bots tries random jump strategies; the survivors breed. After a few generations, the average bot is decent.
Reinforcement learning — DQN or similar, trained on screen pixels. Slow to train, but well-trained agents can play cleanly at the game’s top speed.
Rule-based vision — read the canvas, find the nearest obstacle, jump at fixed distance. Not “AI” in any interesting sense, but it works and it’s a short script.

If you’re benchmarking these, remember that speed rises to a fixed maximum and then holds. Past that point, the hard part is reading pterodactyl heights correctly — duck or jump — and that’s where simple bots usually fail.

Browser extensions

Several browser extensions claim to “always show the Dino game on your new tab.” They work, but quality varies wildly. The good ones are open-source, locally rendered, and don’t request unnecessary permissions. The bad ones inject ads or harvest browsing data. Check the source and the permissions list before installing.

Honestly, the simpler solution is to bookmark dinogame.gg as your new-tab page. One bookmark, no permissions, no extension to keep updated.

Building your own mod

If you want to start: fork wayou/t-rex-runner on GitHub, then look at index.js. Useful entry points:

Runner.config — gravity, speed, max speed, gap coefficient, max obstacle duplication. Edit numbers, reload, see new behaviour.
Runner.spriteDefinition — coordinates into the sprite sheet. Change these to swap which part of the PNG is rendered for the dino, cacti, pterodactyl.
Trex.config and Trex.prototype.startJump — jump physics. Change INIITAL_JUMP_VELOCITY (the misspelling is in the original source) for higher or lower jumps.
Obstacle.types — defines the cacti and pterodactyls, their sizes and when they can appear. Add a new obstacle type here.

For more on the underlying mechanics that mods are tweaking, see how the game was originally built and what hidden features were already in the engine.

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