About Gazillion

What we made

Gazillion is a daily game about when things happened. Each day gives you five historical moments; for each one you trap the year inside a range on a timeline that runs from the Big Bang to this morning. The narrower your range and the closer to the truth, the more you score. A perfect day is 5,000 points and a stamp that says ONE IN A GAZILLION.

Around that simple loop we built a world: eight procedural pixel-art eras that morph as you drag the timeline, a small green dinosaur who reacts to every hit and miss, synthesised chiptune music that changes with the era, and a share card for the group chat. The whole thing is an original work — the code, the art, the writing and the music are made for this site. The Gazillion game runs entirely in your browser.

What we believe

The promises are deliberately boring, and they are permanent:

• Free, all of it. The daily, Unlimited, Archive and Time Machine are free. No paywall, no premium mode, no ad that plays before the dinosaur.
• No accounts. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to log into, and no profile to lose. Progress lives in your browser's local storage.
• No ads, no player profiles. Nothing on the page phones home to an ad network or a tracking pixel, and fonts are self-hosted. Two exceptions: Google Analytics and Cloudflare's cookieless page counter record aggregate visits. The privacy policy explains exactly what it sees and how to block it.
• Fast and small. No runtime frameworks, no huge dependencies, no videos to load. The game is built to start quickly on a mid-range phone.
• Accessible by default. Keyboard controls, visible focus, reduced-motion support, sound that waits for a gesture, and information that is never conveyed by colour alone.
• Your data is yours. Clearing your browser data is a complete reset. There is no server copy to request, and none to leak. See the privacy policy.

The name and the dinosaur

A gazillion is not a real number. It is a cheerful fake quantity people use when a real figure would undersell the point — a gazillion stars, one in a gazillion. A game about the entire history of everything, from the first stars to this morning's news, needed a number that jokes about its own size. You can read the full story (and how many zeros a gazillion does not have) on the what is a gazillion? page.

The dinosaur is the narrator. It starts in the present, and as your day's score climbs it travels further back through the eras — from the night skyline of the Modern Era to a nebula at the beginning of everything. On a good day it is celebrating. On a bad day it is doing its best. It never makes you feel stupid, which is a design rule we take seriously.

Who it is for

Gazillion is for the kind of person who enjoys a daily puzzle and wishes it taught them something they could keep. It is for history teachers who want a two-minute warm-up that starts an argument about periodisation. It is for families who play a daily game together over breakfast, and for trivia fans who are better at recalling facts than at placing them in time. It is also, we hope, for people who think they do not like history — because the game asks where things happened in the story, not whether you memorised the date.

You do not need specialist knowledge. Difficulty is mixed on purpose, scoring rewards a sensible range rather than perfect recall, and the worst outcome is a funny dinosaur face. If you are comparing it with the games you already play, our games like Wordle guide is honest about where Gazillion sits in the genre.

How it is built

Gazillion is a static site with vanilla TypeScript, Canvas 2D and the Web Audio API. There are no runtime dependencies and no server-side accounts; the data is built ahead of time and served as static JSON. The world is drawn procedurally every frame — eight era scenes sharing a camera, a horizon and one small dinosaur — rather than assembled from image files. The sound is synthesised, so there are no audio downloads either.

The fonts are self-hosted under the SIL Open Font License: Silkscreen for labels and the wordmark, Space Grotesk for reading. The pixel art and the writing are original to this project. The historical moments are checked against standard references before they go into the bank, and dates that are genuinely approximate are marked as such in the game.

Originality and attribution

Gazillion is an original game inspired by the daily-game genre. It is not a clone of any specific game and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any other game, publisher or website — including the word game that popularised the daily format, or the timeline game that came before it. The format of “one puzzle a day” is a tradition we are joining, not a thing we are copying.

References to other games on this site are editorial comparisons only. All of Gazillion's code, pixel art, writing, music and game design are original work created for gazillion.games. The name “Gazillion” and the visual identity are ours; the fonts are used under their open licences.

Contact

Feedback, corrections to historical facts and press questions are all welcome. The contact address is hello@gazillion.games — a placeholder for now, with the inbox coming online with the season launch.

If you spot a date you believe is wrong, please include the moment as it appears in the game and a source if you have one. Accuracy matters more to us than being right in the moment, and corrections are treated as improvements, not complaints.