Durable Deathtrap

"Your car needs a service at least every 3 years, but a temple built from stone with primitive tools over one thousand years ago can have a mechanism that runs smoother than a hot curry through a digestive system. Because of magic."

- Cracked.com on Archaeology

Picture the following: Our adventure/fantasy heroes enter some ancient ruins in search of something important or valuable. Although the site may have laid undisturbed for centuries or even millennia, the place is filled with a variety of lethal, fully functional traps left behind by the previous occupants. Said traps are often Bamboo Technology considerably more complex than anything else the creators were capable of making. Even more remarkable is the fact that they have not decayed at all, even if the environment is one that should require extra maintenance, and are just as lethal as they ever were, let alone the fact that any poisons should have decayed centuries ago. Projectile traps might even be capable of reloading themselves an indefinite number of times.

If we consider how this would work in the real world, it is obvious that if a facility is in actual use, it is grossly impractical to install traps that must be disabled or circumvented every time. It is much easier and more efficient to post guards as needed. If it had to be abandoned for some reason, traps might be left behind, but it would probably be easier to remove the important stuff and/or collapse the roof. In any case, traps would decay and cease to function if no one maintained them. But in these kinds of stories, the most complex things are the ones that are least susceptible to decay. This will only ever be pointed out if the ancient civilization is, in fact, still around and doing regular maintenance.

Note that in Speculative Fiction this can be hand waved as being caused by self-repairing technology, and in fantastic settings magic traps may be exempt from decaying or running out of ammo. Still, in most cases it is a grossly unrealistic way to introduce danger into the environment.

This trope is a staple in fiction featuring Adventurer Archaeologists.

See also Ragnarok Proofing. A subtrope of They Don't Make Them Like They Used To and Older Is Better. When the deathtrap is one-time-use-only, this can often be an example of Already Undone for You.

Comic Books

 * Donald Duck, his uncle Scrooge McDuck and their nephews Huey, Luey and Dewey often run into these in Carl Barks' and Don Rosa's comics.
 * Both lampshaded and subverted in an issue of Catwoman. She notes that the deadly traps still functional after centuries would be normal in a movie, but in real life would need maintenance. She soon discovers the owner of the deathtraps is still alive.

Fan Works

 * In An Entry with a Bang!, the GDI team sent to New Dallas encounter a laser turret dating back to the Star League still guarding one of the places they try to explore.

Film

 * Several of the Indiana Jones films. Raiders of the Lost Ark had the famous "trap dodging" sequence at the beginning.
 * It is, however, justified in The Last Crusade. In that movie, the temple housing the Holy Grail is inhabited by a knight from the First Crusade, who has been kept alive by the power of the Grail. He could presumably have maintained the booby traps in the temple over the centuries. It's not like he's had much else to do.
 * Only one of them had moving parts anyway. The others shouldn't need more than occasional sweeping.
 * But one had hidden behind the Grail chamber?
 * Technically, Elsa made the job much more difficult for future explorers when she triggered the collapse of the temple.
 * The most ludicrous example is in the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: when Indy and his party enter the pyramid, they stumble across the remains of the dead conquistadors who entered before. Considering the fact that, in order to enter the pyramid (and arm the trap), you have to open the top of the entire pyramid, you really wonder who "closed" the pyramid after the conquistadors.
 * The colony of natives that they ran into?
 * All the centuries-old booby traps in The Goonies.
 * Though many of these were shown to be falling apart; pieces falling off as the trap activated, and several parts of the caves collapsed completely.
 * Fridge Brilliance says that they were built for instant death, but the time that passed have left the traps barely able to do the killing, giving the Goonies time to get out alive. Plus Prof. Copperpot was killed by just ONE boulder from a trap of Rock Falls Everyone Dies and before reaching the trigger mechanism, so maybe the decaying ropes just snapped and killed the Prof. Now for that wooden ship sitting in salt water for the last 300 years....
 * Actually, the wooden ship in salt water would be in -better- condition. High enough salinity would do well to preserve the wood. Recently, a team found a perfectly preserved ancient era fishing vessel in the Dead Sea.
 * In National Treasure, when they  it is opened through a complex series of counter weights and then the door immediately shuts behind them using equally complex mechanics. Also  . Partially subverted though in that they slowly fall apart after the first use indicating that they weren't durable enough for daily operation but durable enough to be in the single state and then perform a single transition for centuries. Only partially due to the complexity involved in the set up.

Literature
"Ford: I think they're going to have a very good try at applying to us."
 * Discworld:
 * Subverted in Sourcery, where the characters discover all the traps in the Death Course protecting King Creosote's treasure are broken down and worn out. Turns out to be a Double Subversion, when the only one that was actually dangerous (the rest are just practical jokes) works just fine.
 * In this case, the trap is 'only' about fifty years old; the lethal trap in question is one that might plausibly last that long.
 * Played for laughs in Reaper Man where a pair of priests are guarding a huge diamond inside a temple filled with death traps. Although the death traps work fine, they can't stop, well, Death himself from stealing the diamond.
 * In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the main characters arrive at Magrathea—a planet thought to be uninhabited for millions of years—to find that an automated atomic missile system has been directed to fire straight at any incoming ships. Zaphod arrogantly believes that, since the message informing of this is so old, it "doesn't apply to us". That is—until the missiles actually come at them.


 * Used in both Thieves Like Us and the sequel Thieves Until We Die, both times involving the group breaking into ancient tombs. The first was pretty mild . The second was much more elaborate with
 * Matthew Reilly's 'Jack West Junior' series frequently utilizes this trope. The most egregious example is a trap in 'Seven Ancient Wonders' that when you trip the sensor will shoot a live alligator out of a wall at you. This is a trap that is at least a couple thousand years old.
 * Lampshaded in Andy McDermott's Hunt for Atlantis, where a lead character notes that the deathtraps in an Amazon-concealed temple couldn't still be working—until someone else notes that the local Indian tribe has had plenty of time, motivation and ability to reset the devices. Averted in the sequel, The Tomb of Hercules, where at least half the deathtraps representing the Labors of Hercules have already been set off by earlier explorers and are now harmless.

Live-Action TV
"Picard: Is it possible... that we've fallen into the same snare that killed them? A 1,000 year old booby-trap?"
 * In Stargate SG-1, a Jaffa proverb recited by Teal'c states: "They do not build them as they once did."
 * Semi-justified though as a lot of the stuff the Ancients and other civilizations built are very durable, functional magic, and made out of Unobtainium.
 * In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Booby Trap", the Enterprise discovers an ancient ship of archaeological significance, however during the investigation they're caught in a thousand-year-old trap that drains the ship's power and converts it into lethal radiation.


 * Relic Hunter was basically Tomb Raider except with the protagonist split into a sexy heroine and a British sidekick that together recovered artifacts from various ruins. Said ruins were of course chock-full of these.

Tabletop Games

 * Considering the number of dungeons that take place in ancient ruins, Dungeons & Dragons has quite a few of these. Though most dungeons are inhabited, kobolds in particular are good at setting traps, but if the only monsters are non-sentient or dormant then the deathtraps must be very durable indeed.
 * For instance, the ruins of the Ancient Giant civilization of Xen'drik in the Eberron campaign setting usually have deathtraps that have stood for thousands of years.

Video Games
"Goombario: It's amazing that these ruins still have moving parts. Haven't they been buried here for ages and ages? And yet, when we push switches, stuff moves... Amazing craftsmanship. You've gotta applaud the designers."
 * Also features prominently in the Tomb Raider games.
 * Tomb Raider: Legend featured a few subversions—one level had bamboo spike traps that had long broken down and could be used for climbing; in another level, Lara had to reactivate a stopped swinging-blade trap just so she could get past it, and at one point, Lara dispensed with the usual timed jumping and plowed through a spike trap with a forklift.
 * In Tomb Raider: Anniversary, there's one level in which a few of the locked doors don't open all the way, but you can still get through them via a passageway above them.
 * Subverted in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, where both a past and present version of the fortress are visited: the past has many working traps, while in the present most traps have decayed or collapsed. At various times, the only way to get past some traps is to use a time portal to go the present, walk through the nonoperative traps, and then go back to the past in a new portal (note that all other games in the series used this trope to a T).
 * Justified since the locales of the other games were still inhabited until at least shortly before the games' events. In Sands of Time, the Prince even activates the traps himself before noticing that pits, spikes and whirling blades might not be that effective against regenerating, teleporting sand monstrosities...
 * The ruined castle levels in The Shadow and the Flame have fully functional scythe traps.
 * Both the Rakatan ruins on Dantooine and the Temple of the Ancients fit this trope in Knights of the Old Republic. A particularly egregious example, as the Backstory says that both places were visited by adventurers just a few years ago, who presumably had to pass through the ancient traps and 30,000-year-old sentry droids as well, yet they're all intact.
 * Can be hand waved using the Speculative Fiction option above: the building could plausibly contain automation designed to repair its own death traps. Harder to explain the survival of the Star Maps, but those were definitely designed to last a very long time.
 * The game does explain that the Star Maps (and thus possibly other Rakatan tech) are designed to repair themselves. This is why the Star Maps are incomplete; they haven't finished repairing themselves yet.
 * They haven't finished repairing themselves... That IS actually the explicitly given explanation. It might be added that much of it shows obvious signs of deterioration anyway(Only three Functional droids on Dantooine, and about that many or more broken down, for starters?)
 * The Angkor Thom temple from the video game Eternal Darkness fits this trope perfectly, featuring hallways equipped with slamming wall sections, humongous blades capable of slicing a man in a single blow, and holes that fire poisonous darts. Of course, since all the characters are Made of Iron, Ellia will only die after being hit 3 or 4 times by these traps... even though she's the weakest character in the game.
 * Can be chalked up to a great big the giant rotting bulk of slowly-dying Mantorok in the heart of the temple did it. Given that we KNOW just how powerful Anchients are and Mantorok has been repeatedly shown to be capable of manipulating events thousands of miles even as he slowly kicks the bucket, it's safe to say keeping the traps running would be entirely within his power. Alternatively, Pious and his patron could have done so with equal ease for the exact same reason in order to prevent anybody from getting into the temple.
 * The Temple of Pandora in God of War is a major offender, although it circumvents the issue of why to put traps in a place that was in regular use, as it was built expressly to keep the "unworthy" out, and served no other purpose except gruesomely killing people. Despite supposedly being a thousand years old, almost all of the traps and machinery are in perfect working order. Worse, at various points, you see people who attempted to infiltrate the temple as well, living and dead, yet all the traps are reset behind them.  Possibly it's serviced by the gods.
 * Ah, but what if the dead Mooks are the repairmen?
 * It's likely, considering that the game says those who perish in the temple are brought back as enemies.
 * Bear in mind this is a setting where the gods exist and such. It's not all that much of a stretch that a god maintains it in some fashion. There -were- all sorts of Greek gods.
 * Somewhat subverted in The Legend of Zelda series in that certain switches in ancient temple haves rusted and can't be pressed easily. Doesn't stop the rest of it following this trope, though.
 * Somewhat Justified in that the temples are meant as tests for The Hero, and various Hyrulian dieties likely maintain the traps to ensure that only The Hero enters.
 * Lampshaded in the Dry Dry Ruins in the first Paper Mario:


 * The Ayleid ruins of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion are full of durable deathtraps. One of the books on Ayleid history lampshades this fact.
 * One might wonder why a ruin lying around full of treasure in the middle of a country that practically breeds grave robbers looters adventurers that the traps would have been either disabled or at least clogged up with bodies hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
 * Not that unbelievable when you realize the Ayleids were slavemasters who ran a very tight ship for centuries at the least and who thus built to last and that decay and the miscellaneous ways mother nature can get rid of organic debris would take care of the "full of corpses" problem.
 * The strangely impractical designs of these traps makes their continued functioning seem even that much more amazing. Though it's probably for gameplay rather than logical reasons, the fact that the spike traps don't fall on players, or players fall into the spike traps, just screams out that it should not still be functional.
 * Hey, Rule of Cool. Granted, the Advancing Wall of Doom on a bridge with ledges you have to duck into probably takes the cake for the zaniest trap award.
 * It helps to explain a lot about the designs when you realize that the Ayleids: A. built to last, and B. were probably sadists.
 * This very true in Skyrim as well. Both the ubiquitous Nord ruins and the slightly less ubiquitous Dwemer ruins are packed with fully functional ancient traps. Spikes come out of the floor, inexplicable darts shoot out of the walls, spiked doors swing around at you if you step on the wrong button. This is all slightly justified in both cases because the Nords probably had some magic on their side, and the Dwemer were so technically advanced that robots attack you in their dungeons. Robots, fully functional, not crying out for new batteries, begging for maintenance, or creaking a request for the oil can, just get up and attack you.
 * Ancient ruins in Drakan feature fully functional traps. It seems that whirling blades are much more durable than stationary stone walls.
 * The Wild ARMs games are full of these, though they are usually of the "blocks the way" rather than the "kills you" variety. Wild ARMs 2 was particularly bad in the way the devices seemed to have been tailored exactly so that the specific combination of abilities of the heroes who explored them thousands of years later are needed to bypass them.
 * As one example, there is a switch in Wild ARMs 2 that's at just the right height that the only way to hit it is by knocking down a series of crumbling pillars like dominoes. The trap relied on the dungeon being an ancient ruin to be bypassed. Inverted Trope?
 * In Painkiller, the medieval-style shields used by the Templar enemies can block all of Daniel's weapons - even the rockets that should have taken both shield and user simultaneously.
 * Justified in that they were (strangely themed) demons in Purgatory and that they and their equipment were most likely made from Hellish materials and souls.
 * Both subverted and played straight in the Wario Land series. Played straight with the Golden Pyramid in the fourth game (complete with portals, music room/karaoke and shop), and Rollanratl in Shake Dimension (despite being a few thousand year old robot guardian of an ancient civilization, it can still hold up the roof, fire missiles and shoot laser beams at intruders an infinite amount of times.
 * Subverted with a certain treasure in Wario Master of Disguise (named the Vengeful Robot Controller):
 * This remote allows you to summon a giant robot hidden deep within the bowels of the earth and unleash him on your unsuspecting enemies. But it's out of batteries.
 * A modern equivalent is the excess of unexploded cars in Fallout 3. Because Every Car Is a Pinto, shooting a car anywhere, with any kind of gun, will cause it to violently explode. But even those parts of the Capital Wasteland that have seen decades of urban warfare still feature cars that have not yet been shot. The town of Minefield is inhabited by a sniper who will shoot at the cars around you before he can even see you, yet inexplicably has never done this to anyone else before.
 * Freedom Fighters also has explodey (and otherwise useless) cars seasoning its levels. It's a good safety tip to pop a car before using it for cover. The computer controlled opponents conveniently never think of this.
 * The penultimate dungeon in Final Fantasy XII is a giant dilapidated lighthouse that crumbles with your every step, but all of its poison trap, slow-gas machines, and Deadly Spikes work as if they were just installed.
 * Justified, because the traps are definitely magical in nature.
 * Assassin's Creed plays it straight with the Assassin Tombs and Templar Lairs in the second game and Brotherhood. The Auditore Family Crypt from AC2, which is around two hundred years old and yet still has an elaborate network of lever-activated, timed gateways; some of the Assassin Tombs are even older and have even more elaborate technology. Brotherhood subverts the trope a bit with the introductory segment where the modern protagonists go through the Auditore Crypt, and in the intervening 500 years the mechanisms have all decayed (though functional pulley-operated bridges still exist).
 * The Assassin Tombs may at least be somewhat justified, depending on
 * Diablo doesn't have many traps of the classic variety, but a common baffling feature of dungeons is skeletons inside barrels. Who put the skeleton in there? Why hasn't the skeleton broken out? If the skeleton put himself in there so he could ambush you, why does he always wait to show himself until you've broken open the barrel and the skeleton is directly in the path of your weapon?
 * Diablo 3 continues this, plus coffins that pop up out of the ground in a field for no apparent reason and open to release a skeleton.
 * The Uncharted series plays with this - while the adventuring segments rarely actively try to kill the player, any slippery handhold or misjudged jump can spell a quick, flat death. The puzzles often involve navigating rooms with huge clockwork systems and complex hydraulics which are always visibly decayed but, as a rule, will never be quite so decayed that Drake can't get past them. There are countless occasions where the loss of one more tiny architectural detail would render the game unwinnable, and just as many occasions where that same brick or pole will fall off the wall as soon as Drake is done with it - meaning if anyone had tried before him, or if it had rained particularly hard the day before, Drake would have had to turn around and go home.
 * And then it gets played straight in the second game, where Nate and Chloe fall into a room with a descending spiked ceiling.
 * The Enrichment Center in Portal 2 both subverts and plays this straight, depending on which part of the game you're in. While you're in the upper levels of the Enrichment Center that you got familiar with in the original, the place is dilapidated, overgrown, and bits of it aren't functioning right. When you go down into the bowels of the Enrichment Center to the original iteration deep underground, everything is in perfect working order, right down to the pre-recorded, automated messages from Cave Johnson, who was long-dead by the time the original game rolled around.
 * In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Starkiller visits the ruins of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, and the security system is still operational, forcing Starkiller to contend with droids and Hard Light simulations.
 * In Serious Sam III: BFE: You go inside a pyramid where everything is crumbling and yet there are still levers that activate falling ceilings. Could be justified in that there might be some Sirian technology behind the scenes holding everything together.

Web Comics

 * Lampshaded and hand waved in the web comic Dungeon Damage. Most traps were built by hired Dwarves (who had much more advanced tech and durable materials than most in the Medieval European Fantasy setting) and the traps are reset by a waterwheel connected to an underground river, which turns gears to ratchet the doors etc., back to their starting position after each trap goes off. Ironically, many of the treasures protected are much more perishable than the traps themselves; papyrus scrolls or valuable spices, for example.

Western Animation

 * Inverted very nicely in Ben 10 episode "The Ultimate Weapon", with a Mayan temple that's dangerous mainly because it wasn't built to last. Well, that and the Mayan God Of Death hangs out there; but aside from that, there's a grand total of one trap. In fact the "ultimate weapon" is just a brittle old sword.
 * Subverted in an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, in which Aang and explore the ruins of a long extinct culture. When they run into a series of booby traps,  wonders how the traps are still operational after all this time.

Real Life

 * There are a few traps built into the great pyramids to deter robbers, that, thanks to low-tech design, continued to catch stupider people, mostly by trapping them in tight spaces or building huge pits in the middle of the passage. Needless to say, the robbers got around them. But the skeletons of past robbers were still present when modern archeologists found them (this is a problem with durable deathtraps, the dusty skeletons with punji sticks through the eyes tend to be a tip-off).
 * The primary purpose of those pits was to catch rainwater to prevent it from ruining the tombs, by the way. Catching graverobbers was just a side benefit.
 * Truth in Television: Land mines can last for a very long time. Live ones are a serious problem in Third World countries with decades-old fields lost in the records.
 * The situation in Laos deserves a particular mention; it was a real-life Acceptable Target during the Vietnam war, where bombers would offload any excess munitions. There are still numerous non-profits dedicated exclusively to combing farms and safely detonating the explosives.
 * European countries including Germany and Britain still discover unexploded bombs from World War II. There are also artefacts from the first world war being unearthed in France and Belgium to this day, called an Iron Harvest.
 * They still cause deaths to this day, often from being turned up by ploughing, or set of by fires burned over them. They're also a LOT less stable after nearly 100 years, and tend to be easier to set off than when they were made. It makes it very tough to make them safe - there is work for the Belgian and French bomb disposal squads for many years yet...
 * This perpetual danger of unexploded ordinance remains the drive for contemporary landmine bans. The US response has been to create landmines that deactivate after a set time, or when batteries fail.
 * It's not just explosives: after the war, the allies simply dumped much of Germany's chemical weapons stockpile into the sea. Fishermen in the Baltic Sea still occasionally dredge up corroded, leaking shells full of still potent gas.
 * Ironically, in Real Life you don't need to put traps in most caves or any decayed ruins- they're plenty dangerous to explore on their own.
 * According to some accounts, the Anasazi cliff dwellers had one in which you needed to climb down a set of hand- and footholds to get to their living areas. But if you started with the wrong foot (either left instead of right, or vice versa), you'd come to a point where you couldn't reach the next foothold down—and, so the accounts say, this was usually after you'd climbed far enough down that you were too tired to climb back up, or something along those lines. Meaning you'd just hang on there for a while, arms hurting more and more, until you fell to your death.
 * High-order maritime salvage operations behave very much like these even through the the traps are not intentionally engineered, whether a wreck is five days old or five centuries. The combination of deep water, foul weather, rusty engineering, hungry fauna and old explosives makes for a lot of hazards. Some wrecks (typically felled ammunition freighters) have been deemed too dangerous to approach, despite their accessibility.