I know Wayland and a basic compositor aren't what you're looking for, but it's the closet thing available in theory to what you asked on Unix-like. Some compositors aren't about a traditional desktop, some are a menu-screen and a direct choice to the game.
x11-wm/gamescope is one for Steam games. So much can be done like that. SDL is supposed to be able to run on Wayland. Despite this, so much on Wayland still requires XWayland and X dependencies.
Maybe an SDL compositor on Wayland is lacking (at least on FreeBSD), which most of any program still depends on dependencies from an older standard.
Another way that resembles what you asked for, is to use the windowmanager of
x11-wm/antiwm, which you'll run a command and the game runs on X. Using AntiWM isn't what you asked for, but it will give the same impression of what you asked for.
That's an example of AntiWM in low resolution with a graphical desktop animation played on it. The background is the actual terminal with output of the
ls
command displayed.
desktop/hot-babe is in the foreground, run from the command line (which the command to run it may be obscured), which is typically a graphical desktop widget: that was run as an example to show a graphic run on a terminal. It only allows one video/graphical application to play at a time. AntiWM requires less dependencies than a traditional Window Manager, and this can be up and running quickly. You could get the functionality of running graphical games from DOS with this, yet with X behind the scenes.
Others have said that a Window Manager like that can be used to have separate text consoles for each screen for multi monitor setups, as normally that can't be done.
The other case of using images on the terminal is of applications that use Lua, which has been used for bootup screens on FreeBSD. That hasn't been used for video or animations.