There's already a perl interface to aalib, so that probably takes care of images rendered as ascii (as opposed to more line-oriented ascii art that humans would produce).

Had you seen TTY Quake before? Sadly it doesn't seem that anyone has uploaded a Youtube video of it, but there is TTY World of Warcraft

I have a bzcat movie of TTYQuake somewhere lost in my old backups of harddrives I think. I should hunt that down...