Prehistoria

The video game version of the stone age, where cavemen and women and dinosaurs live side by side. Most of the time, the dinosaurs will live in volcanoes and/or breathe fire. Expect a blend of Jungle Japes and Lethal Lava Land. Typically features mix of different prehistoric creatures—like mastodons and triceratops living side by side and Everything Is Trying to Kill You. Expect to kill a lot of Stock Dinosaurs and/or cavemen. Please ignore the Palaeontologist sobbing softly in the corner.

Named after the cave area of Secret of Evermore.

Compare Lost World, One Million BC.

Examples of Prehistoria include:

MMORPGs

• In World of Warcraft, while there are dinosaurs throughout Azeroth (raptors, thunder lizards [aka kodos], and plesiosaurs, and the first two are even bred as mounts), it's the Un'Goro Crater where you can also find tyrannosaurs, Dimetrodons, and pterosaurs, which are nowhere else in the world. The Crater, with its dinosaur population, offbeat quests, and pop culture references, is popular for questing in the 40-50 range as well as the easiest place for Beast Master-specced Hunters to tame tyrannosaurs as pets. As for humanoids, Un'Goro is actually the only zone in the game without a permanent settlement, just a small camp to the north composed of a politically neutral mishmash of races.
  • The entire area is a Shout-Out to Land of the Lost, including the names of the characters and the camp itself ("Marshall's Refuge"), as well as pylons that one can use power crystals of various colors in.
  • Since the Shattering patch there is an explanation if you finish every quest line in the crater: a Titan is using the area for experiments, and it was specifically created for this purpose when they forged the world.

Tabletop Games

• The GURPS RPG supplement Lands Out Of Time introduces the "World of Banded Night" - which is this trope. It includes dinosaurs, cavemen, ape-men, even lizard-men and the ruins of an ultra-tech civilization.
• The world of Jund in the Shards of Alara expansion for Magic: The Gathering is pretty clearly based on this trope, though they get away with it by being pure fantasy. Actual dragons replace the dinosaurs, brutal reptilian humanoids lord it over tribes of primitive humans and goblins, and the land itself is scarred by volcanic rifts where it isn't covered in chokingly dense jungle or festering tar pits.

Video Games

• The entire setting of many games:
  • Star Fox Adventures
  • Joe and Mac Caveman Ninja
  • Bonk's Adventure and its sequels
  • Dino City
  • Congo's Caper
  • Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire
  • Carnivores hand waves it, since it's set on a different world that happens to have convergent evolution. Past this weak justification, it's basically the trope, although it at least separates the dinosaurs and ice age mammals (the mammals going in the more polar regions, the dinosaurs in the more temperate, equatorial islands).
  • Roc'n Rope
  • Adventures of Dino Riki
• Dinosaur Jungle in Sonic and The Secret Rings. The game is based on the Arabian Nights, which made a lot of people wonder why there were dinosaurs... it's actually a reference to the story of Sinbad, although very exaggerated.
• Much of Dinosaur Land in Super Mario World. Cavepeople were added in the cartoon.
• 65,000,000 B.C. in Chrono Trigger, with the added touch of humanity fighting against reptilian humanoids called Reptites—essentially dinosaurs with human forms and intelligence. On the party's second visit, they witness Lavos crashing into the earth, causing the mass extinction of dinosaurs and Reptiles alike.
• Many, many Amiga games. The Chuck Rock series. The Prehistorik series. Bignose the Caveman. Ugh!. And the list goes on.
• The Prehistoric Turtlesaurus level from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Turtles in Time.
• The premise of the game EVO Search for Eden is to evolve your character from tiny fish to mighty land mammal. Needless to say, the whole game is set in a relatively scientifically accurate version of this (except for the aliens meddling with evolution and the dinosaurs living in secluded areas).
  • You only become a mammal if you want to. You can also finish the game as a reptile or a bird.
• World 6 (the Cliff) of Donkey Kong Country Returns.
• Terrydactyland in Banjo-Tooie has three different tribes of cavemen and several kinds of dinosaurs.
• Planet Sargasso in Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.
• A few levels of Ecco the Dolphin were a cross of this and Under the Sea. The enemies included a prehistoric version of the common jellyfish enemy, dinicthys fish standing in for the sharks, giant seahorses, and inexplicably vicious trilobites. Seriously.
• The Lost Underworld segment of EarthBound. The place (and the monsters in it) are so huge that your party is only a few pixels high by comparison.
• Tyrannia in the virtual pets game Neopets.
• One of the video game levels in which the Scooby-Doo gang are trapped in the animated movie, "Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase". And it does have a T-rex and Woolly Mammoths co-existing.
  • And the characters lampshade the hell out of it.
• The first world of the first Lost Vikings game. Its only pretense at actually being a prehistoric world was its dinosaur and human enemies, however, as the stages featured the usual assortment of keys, bombs, and drawbridges found in the other levels. It is literally called "Prehistoria".
• The fifth chapter of Super Paper Mario uses this setting, but with no dinosaurs to be found, just giant wooly mammoth...things.
• Pogo's prehistoric chapter in Live a Live.
• The "Uga Buga" chapter in Conkers Bad Fur Day has a T. rex marching down a walkway suspended over lava, eating cavemen as it goes. The game lampshades this trope by having Conker complain about how he can't even visit a "dinosaur-themed world" without being mugged by a bunch of cavemen.
• "Cave Cat 3,000,000 BC" in Garfield: Caught in the Act (arguably inspired by the book/TV special Garfield: His 9 Lives, one of which is a cave cat).
• The Cavelem tribe in Lemmings 2.
• Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg has Dino Mountain. With dinosaur skulls that vomit lava.
• Adventures of Rad Gravity's Planet Sauria.
• Prehistoric Plaza in Power Pete.