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5 games you can play on your MacBook Pro's Touch Bar

Want to get the most out of your expensive Pro and its fancy Touch Bar? Of course you do!

Jason Cipriani Contributing Writer, ZDNet
Jason Cipriani is based out of beautiful Colorado and has been covering mobile technology news and reviewing the latest gadgets for the last six years. His work can also be found on sister site CNET in the How To section, as well as across several more online publications.
Jason Cipriani
2 min read

The MacBook Pro 's TouchBar can be useful within apps, providing shortcuts to extra functionality and features. However, there's more to the tiny strip of touchscreen on Apple 's MacBook Pro. Games! That's right, the TouchBar is a gaming workhorse. Well, maybe that's taking it a bit far, but you can play games on it.

Some of the games below are posted on GitHub, as full repositories you can compile yourself, or with a download link to the app itself.

Pac-Bar

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Playing Pac-Man in a straight line with a single ghost chasing you seems simple enough, right? Wrong.

Use the arrows on your keyboard to move, using the tunnels to jump across the TouchBar. Just remember, the ghosts are really smart. Pac-Bar is free to download.

Touch Bar Piano

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Hey, Mozart, ready to tap on the smallest digital ivory keys you've ever seen? The free Touch Bar Piano includes 128 different instruments for you to pick from.

Watch How To customize your MacBook Pro Touch Bar

TouchBarDino

Jason Cipriani/CNET

Imagine a dinosaur running through a desert, jumping over cacti in order to survive -- that's TouchBarDino. Well, technically that's the game hidden in Google's Chrome browser when you don't have an internet connection, but someone brought it to the MacBook Pro, too.

Launch the game, tap on the Touch Bar to start your little dinosaur running, and then keep tapping to make him jump over each approaching cactus.

TouchBarPong

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This is by far the funnest of the group, and works well enough to play for an extended amount of time.

Use the Touch Bar to control the Pong paddle and hit the ball back onto the side of the computer-controlled opponent. The only downside here is that the Touch Bar feels slow when responding to quick adjustments, so there's a bit of learning curve to get the hang of it.

You can get TouchBarPong for free or in the Mac App Store ,where it's updated often, for $1.99.

Nyancat

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Alright, so this one isn't technically a game, but it's just as much fun. Developer Vatsaev Aslan decided the perfect use for the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar would be as a home for internet meme Nyancat, playing its theme song along the way.

That's truly all this app does, but for Nyancat's biggest fans, that's all it needs to do. You can download TouchBar Nyancat for free.