No, but I did escape once with a fake amulet of yendor. I think that's when I lost my spirit for returning.
One of my favorite things to do was enter a shop and then throw things out the door of the shop so the shopkeepr didn't think I was stealing. Also, can't remember how, but I used to be able to get my pet to steal things from the shop.
Oh, and if you could pick up the corpse of a cockatrice then anything you attacked and hit with it turned to stone. Nice. Maybe you needed to be wearing gloves to do that. Can't remember it was a long time ago.
I did also get addicted to another text based game called "Empire" for a while. I'm not sure if it still exists.
I think I played it on a Compaq 286.
Oh no... I can feel that long faded addiction tugging me back to the console......I'd better call my sponsor.
One time I was wielding the cockatrice corpse with gloves on, and I was doing pretty well until I found a succubus, who seduced me into taking off all my clothes...including my gloves...
I ascended for the first time during my first internship. (Didn't miss much, was with SAP.)
P.S. I never played a version of nethack that let you throw stuff out of the shop with the shopkeeper still alive. But I've been playing for less than ten years.
My dad played a lot of Classic Empire back in the day. I gravitated more towards a similar game that I think was called Conquest, where the turns auto-advanced (felt like an RTS) and infantry could cross bodies of water themselves by turning into boats. Wish I could find that one again, I've never found it on any of the 'old games' lists.
There was a game called Conquest, which was a fantasy game similar to Empire. I recall that you could play various races, Orcs being one of them, Wizards another. It was very detailed, with each square of the map's terrain having ratings for how useful it was. I remember that there was a note in the source or license that the game was free but not allowed to be run on 'PCs'. (I interpreted this to mean MSDOS machines, and was able to get it running under Coherent). This would have been in the early 90s.
The game I played was definitely not a fantasy game, it had modern-type units like armor and airplanes. Neither was the Classic Empire game that my dad played, with aircraft carriers and battleships and the like.
I should point out that the rascal responsible for that cause of bleary eyes in many a grad student is among us and even gloating about it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10686686
