Play classic games in Terminal

1 Open Terminal

Launch Terminal on your Mac. You will find this in Applications>utilities, but it is far easier and quicker to just type ‘terminal’ into Spotlight and let that do the searching for you.

2 Enable Emacs

Built into your Mac is a family of text editors called Emacs and this must be launched in order to get the games working. Type emacs into Terminal and press enter.

3 Press Escape

The screen will fill with text. Look out for the highlighted words ‘GNU Emacs’ at the bottom of the window and once you see these, press escape on your keyboard.

4 ‘X’ marks the spot

Now all you need to do is press the ‘X’ key on your keyboard so that the prompt at the bottom of this window reads ‘M-x’. It is now ready for you to input the name of the game.

5 Type a game name

It is now time to choose the game that you wish to play. Look at the boxout below to see how you can discover the available games. In this case, we’re typing ‘tetris’.

6 Have fun!

The game will now appear on the screen in all of its retro glory, ready for you to start playing. For many of the games you can use the cursor keys and spacebar to play. Enjoy!