It was only when I started writing something coherent to go along with this link that I realized that the fascination that it describes is really rather morbid - a feeling shared when I pointed somebody or other recently to what I thought of as the "best death" that happened in Knightmare. Even though I would like to think we're a relatively calm nation in general, it seems we have a national fascination with the diabolical, and even I view it as a great shame that it seems political correctness has advanced to the point where we can't, for example, blindfold someone and shove them in a corridor with virtual saws coming towards them in the name of entertainment.

I never much got into Nethack myself, but I know enough about it to say that the idea of it is to ramble around dungeons while being harassed by various ASCII characters. Despite the crudeness that you would think of it from the presentation, the game has been in development and continually added to by several hundred people for over twenty years, meaning that by now, it seems very difficult to do anything that the game doesn't have a response for. One of the ways in which you can see this is the multitude of colourful ways in which it's possible to end your character's life - this server keeps a list of the ways in which its players died, as reported by the game. Quite apart from the surprising deadliness of soldier ants at the top, by skimming further down this list it's possible to find some entries that would look faintly insulting as epitaphs:


The messages become unique about halfway down the list, due to the game allowing you to give your own names to a lot of items and creatures within it. The sheer variety of what people come up with for these is a whole new level of entertainment.


But I think the best one is the succinct commentary that the game makes on your ability as a player if you happen to die in one particular, well, terminally embarrassing way: