I wish I could remember where I read this line, but it's lost on me. "We want to hire someone who rewrote Quake to render it's graphics in ASCII, just for the fun of it." (I'm sure I mangled the quote, too.)
aaquake, with aalib. It existed, but it squinted your eyes.
Aatv on higher terminal resolutions was almost usable, but once fbtv worked no one cared about that. Ditto with mplayer with fbdev output.
I love this, it's hacking for hacking's sake.