Play Tetris, Pong, and other games within the Terminal

With any installation of Mac OS X comes Emacs (Extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor) and with it, some easter eggs that let you play some good old 70′s games directly at the command line.

In order to access these games, simply type into the command prompt:

emacs -q --no-splash -f game

Replace game with the game you want to play. Here are some of the most popular: tetris, snake, pong, doctor, hanoi. So to launch Tetris you would type:

emacs -q --no-splash -f tetris

To play tetris simply use the arrow keys and the spacebar. As for pong, it is a two player game (or a contest of your left hand versus your right). Player one uses Left/Right (or 4/6) and Player Two uses Up/Down (or 2/8).

You can see the full list of games and other fun animations, type into the terminal prompt:

ls /usr/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/play/

Thank you to Carl Gravel for the tip!