Claude Code Arcade

Claude Code Arcade is an open-source hobby project by jystervinou that embeds playable 80s arcade games directly into the Claude Code terminal status line. Released under the MIT license, it runs a small daemon that animates each terminal window with its own independent game, driven by Claude's activity in that session. The project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.

What It Is

Claude Code Arcade is a terminal status-line extension for Claude Code that turns the one-line status bar into a self-playing arcade cabinet. It supports Ms. Pac-Man, R-Type, Frogger, WOPR (from WarGames), an aquarium, and a safari — each playing itself automatically, with optional joystick control. Every open terminal window gets its own independent game world, its own score, and its own high score, keyed by the session_id Claude Code passes to the status line.

How It Works

A small Node.js daemon runs one game world per open session and writes each window its own rendered frame every 200ms. The statusline.sh script prints the frame belonging to its session. Windows are distinguished by Claude Code's session_id, so two windows of the same size still run two separate games. The daemon shuts itself down two minutes after the last window closes, or immediately on arcade off.

• Games are animated by Claude's actual activity: Reads become Bydo drones in R-Type, Writes become armored gunships, and Claude's replies drop a Force pod
• Ms. Pac-Man laps the maze, eats dots, runs from ghosts, and chases fruit with real arcade scoring
• WOPR types its way through the WarGames film — the logon, the game list, and a round of Global Thermonuclear War
• The aquarium and safari themes offer calmer emoji-based alternatives

The Sprite Font

The arcade uses an original pixel font placed in Unicode 16's "Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement" block (U+1CC10–1CC37), a range no macOS system font covers. CoreText's automatic font fallback finds the installed arcade font for those codepoints, enabling full-color sprite rendering without patching system fonts. Each glyph is drawn one square per pixel — 16×16 for Ms. Pac-Man and Frogger characters, 24×16 across three cells for R-Type sprites — with color layers baked in. WOPR and Ms. Pac-Man work without the font at all.

Setup Path

Installation is a single command pasted into Claude Code or any terminal:

• Clones the repo to ~/.claude-code-arcade and runs install.sh
• Writes to ~/.arcade/, ~/.local/bin/arcade, one font file in the user font directory, and the statusLine key in ~/.claude/settings.json
• Requires Node (any recent version) and macOS or Linux; no sudo, nothing system-wide
• The installer checks for conflicts and asks before overwriting anything it didn't create
• Uninstall with one command; scores are preserved unless --purge is passed

Requires a full terminal quit and reopen after install to pick up the sprite font, because terminals cache glyph lookups per process.

Optional Joystick Control

Ms. Pac-Man, R-Type, and Frogger accept player input, though the games play themselves without it. Two input modes are available:

• Spare pane mode: run arcade play in a separate terminal pane; arrow keys steer, up boosts
• Global mode (macOS only): arcade play global uses F1/F2/F3 as controls from any window, requiring a one-time Accessibility permission grant

In R-Type, F1 flies left, F2 right, and F3 fires or releases the wave cannon when charged. The auto-pilot resumes about 30 seconds after the player stops steering.

Current Status

The repository was created on 2026-08-30 and last updated on 2026-09-01, making it a very new project with 2 stars and no forks at time of writing. It is an independent hobby project released under the MIT license, written primarily in JavaScript.