With a small framebuffer font aatv was almost watchable over a distance, but OFC fbtv made it obsolete, and ditto with mplayer -vo aalib as movies worked in the framebuffer just as fine as X.

But I remember the BB demo and I still remember these catchy s3m modules...

https://aa-project.sourceforge.net/bb/

And, well, not AA, but I still play today tons of text adventures and roguelikes (and BSDgames and such), and my main X environment it's CLI/TUI based except for CWM (Window manager), MPV/MuPDF/NSxiv (images) and djview4 for DJVU files..