In my Audiosurf review, I wrote about nostalgia and the lens through which certain games inevitably have to be viewed. In that review, I talked about the memories the game evoked, the sensation of sitting in a too small, too expensive flat, curled around the one game I had that wasn’t pirated, making a date night out of what I had, and loving every minute of it. It’s impossible for me to disentangle the memories of playing the game from the game itself, and my review reflected that.

I’m in a similar position with Dino Run. Though its Steam release date is 2015, Dino Run was originally one of the many, many flash games that populated the internet in the early 2000s. Released in 2008, I first started playing it when I found it via Stumbleupon shortly after its release. It became one of the games that defined my high school experience. Loading it up immediately conjures up memories of lingering in dim school corridors with my (then) boyfriend, giggling and passing a laptop back and forth, playing the game less to play it, and more to quietly exchange forbidden kisses, keeping an ever-watchful eye out for the chaperones who were meant to be preventing us from doing exactly what we were doing.

Look, I was seventeen. We’re all dramatic at seventeen.

Playing Dino Run, then, is less the experience of playing this game, and more the experience of looking back almost twenty years at who I was, who I’ve been, and what a game like this can even mean any more. It’s the process of contextualising memories and sifting through what’s real and what’s created, and being left with the question of whether it even matters.

I think I deserve bonus points for recognising and being able to name each species of dinosaur in this game.

Dino Run is a side-scrolling, arcade-style game. You play as a dinosaur fleeing the coming apocalypse, trying to find shelter in some promised, far-off cave. Along the way, there are obstacles to leap over, eggs to collect, snacks to enjoy, and other, generally larger, dinosaurs to harass.

Dino Run is not a particularly complex game. While it does have systems to upgrade the dinosaur and the potential to gather special power-ups and do little tricks here and there, these aren’t strictly necessary to achieve the end goal. The player can make it to the end of the level - and survival - through their tenacity and ability to jump at appropriate times alone.

As a game, Dino Run does fine. It is neither the most complex or engaging game ever, nor does it have anything particularly off-putting. Its music is fun and matches the silly, pixelated art. The levels repeat in the same, memorisable patterns, but there are a variety of modes and enough randomness to ensure it never gets strictly boring. Having an upgrade system and hidden bonuses throughout the levels gives an incentive for the player to try different approaches, but making them optional also means there is no obligation to do anything but just run forward towards safety. Indeed, when I play this game, that’s all I ever really do. I charge my little dinosaur forward, jumping over rocks and flinging myself at pterodactyls, ignoring most bonuses and power-ups, and instead just seeing how quickly I can make it to the sanctuary at the end of the level.

I think how I play this game is a reflection of the game and the narrative surrounding it. It’s also a reflection of what I actually want out of it, and the story it’s trapped in.

I'm a cowboy, wild and free.

I rarely play Dino Run anymore, not because it isn’t fun - it is, albeit in short bursts and when I’m looking to kill a few minutes - but because it’s reminiscent of a time and a place I’m no longer in. This is a game that belongs to seventeen year old me, discovering the wonders of the world for the first time, not the me currently sitting on my couch, sipping at tea and struggling to articulate why the nostalgia this game evokes is simultaneous the best thing for it and the worst.

Throughout Dino Run, the player plays as a dinosaur, fleeing for a sanctuary that looks like the world they’re leaving behind. It’s replete with snacks and bonus points and everything the dinosaur has been forced to skip in its mad dash to get to the end, but above all else, is a place that lies beyond the havoc occurring just outside the rock door. If they were to step outside, the dinosaur would be confronted with the devastation of the world it came from and would be forced to recognise that there is no going back. It can either be crushed beneath a new reality, or it can stay in its tiny, perfectly preserved bubble. It, of course, chooses to stay.

I don’t blame it. I do the same thing. As do, I suspect, most of the people playing this game in 2024.

The doom is ever-approaching.

I have been receiving e-mails from the developers of this game, Pixeljam, since 2013. Scanning through my inbox, the earliest e-mail I have from them is from November 2013. The most recent is from September. For eleven years, I have been receiving e-mails with updates about Dino Run 2. For eleven years, I’ve gotten ideas of what it could be, concept art, design updates, and promises of multiplayer, slurping animations, and trees. For my entire adult life, this dev team has been working on some kind of continuation of this game, and they have yet to bring it to fruition.

I don’t think this is a failure on the part of the devs. The nature of creative industries is to be fickle, and which games get made and which don’t feels less like the product of whether something is a good idea, and more on random chance. Some get funded, some get their big, lucky break, and most do not.

And some have their break, but at a point where all the good it does them is to contain them in a particular bubble. They race forward, escaping the doom of never being seen only to find that what awaits them at the other end is an artificial bubble, sealing them into a particular time and place that can never be recaptured.

If you browse the comments on this game on Steam, you’ll see that the vast majority of them are about playing this game as a kid, or about how much joy they get from the act of being nostalgic. There are none about the game itself or about how it plays as a game because, for its audience, it has ceased to be a game. It is a memory of a time that can’t be recaptured, where nothing of any greater substance is wanted or required.

I’m no different. This game is my memories of a secluded corridor, of first loves, of furtive glances searching for the ever-looming authority figure.

But when I want to get lost in those memories again, it’s Dino Run I turn to. I return to that tiny bubble and let the doom lash the outside of my door, safe in this bubble I’ve created.

Developer: Pixeljam
Genre: Arcade
Year: 2015
Country: United States
Language: English
Play Time: 5-10 minutes/run
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/cfOtL_5rQMM