OK, time for a classic palaeontology opener metaphor, I’m afraid. You ever heard of a ‘living fossil’? It’s not an enemy from Deathtrap Dungeon, alas, but an organism that’s remained virtually unchanged for huge stretches of time. The archetypal living fossil is the coelacanth, a fish that first appeared in the fossil record getting on for half a billion years ago, with thick, stumpy fins poised right on the cusp of becoming rubbish legs. However, it never took after its taxonomic cousins and invaded the land – instead, it persisted with that same liminal body plan, in the evolutionary equivalent of being forever on the brink of sneezing, until it got binned with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And then, off the coast of South Africa in 1938, a fisherman caught one. Unchanged. To look at a coelacanth is to look into deep time, and even though it’s not much cop as an actual fish, it’s beyond fascinating as a piece of living history.
So Deathtrap Dungeon, yeah? It’s that. Only it’s a game rather than a fish. And rather than providing a haunting glimpse down through the yggdrasilian roots of tetrapod biology, it’s a showcase of how simultaneously charming and rubbish 1980s trad fantasy was.