Play Tetris in Mac OSX Terminal

Terminal has many hidden features and cool “easter eggs” buried within it. One of those is the ability to play Tetris within the Terminal window itself.

Update: this is actually part of the Gnu Emacs and is something you can do on any unix system that has Emacs on it.

To get to it all you have to do is:

1. Open Terminal
2. type: “emacs” - wait for the screen to load
3. hit “esc” then type “x”
4. type “tetris” in lowercase letters

A Tetris game will load in the window and you can play it by using the arrow keys to control the falling blocks.

Thanks to Sarah for sending this in! update: Looks like Sarah found it on TUAW.

Submitted on October 6, 2008 at 2:22 pm - Play Tetris in Mac OSX Terminal was written by Michael - There have been 10 comments - Categorized in Terminal Tips

10 Responses to “Play Tetris in Mac OSX Terminal”

chris

For god's sake, that is not an easter egg. In fact it has nothing to do with the Terminal application.

This post was "borrowed" from here: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/10/01/terminal-tips-play-tetris-in-terminal/

And there is a reason TUAW was burned for posting this "tip". October 6th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
al

Absolutely. It's an standard emacs game... You can find it in Linux too... October 6th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Michael

@chris

The tip was emailed to me by reader. I'm guessing that's where she got it - but if that had been the source of the post, I would have linked to it.

And whether you think it's a good tip or not - it's still a tip that's something not everyone knows about their Mac. If you can do it in Linux too - that's great...but that doesn't make it invalid here. October 6th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
chris

I don't argue whether its a good tip or not. All I'm saying is that the explanation is wrong: it's not a feature of the terminal ("Terminal has many hidden features and cool 'easter eggs' buried within it")

1. Open Terminal
1. Open *X11*
1. ssh into your machine
1. Login to a random linux distro
1. Boot Windows, install emacs

2. type: “emacs” - wait for the screen to load
3. hit “esc” then type “x”
4. type “tetris” in lowercase letters October 7th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Sam

As chris said, it might be a good tip but the explanation is wrong. It is a well-known built-in feature of emacs. In fact there are plenty of other games (see for example http://jamesthornton.com/emacs/node/emacs_474.html ) October 7th, 2008 at 11:22 am
salome jones

The point isn't whether or not its a good tip, the point is whether or not its a TRUE tip. It is not true as printed. All you need to do is go back and do a little edit that informs your readers that it is in fact part of Emacs and not Terminal.app, and that it works on anything that's capable of running Gnu Emacs, which is every POSIX compliant (or near compliant) operating system there is. You can even point out how cool it is that Apple displays such Unix-ey goodness everywhere. October 8th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Matt

You can also play Pong with the same procedure, you just need to type in "pong" in the place of "tetris." October 9th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Matthew Corgan

I was playing Tetris on my Macbook Pro at http://originalnintendo.net/home/2008/10/play-tetris-style-game-n-blox-by-neave.html

But I did not know you could do that procedure. very interesting. I'm a Tetris dork though. Spent 4 hours the one afternoon playing it on the nes. October 14th, 2008 at 5:52 am
Mike Swope

These instructions don't work. I think a step or two are missing. October 20th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
yardain amron

you can type:
pong, snake, tetris, life, or doctor.
all these are games u can play in terminal October 25th, 2008 at 5:46 pm