I have fond memories of code page 437 (CP437). Code 1 is a smiley face. So is code 2. How cool is that! Codes 3 to 6 are playing card suits. The higher codes also contained line and box drawing characters. This allowed writing simple text adventure games that could be embellished with these graphical symbols. The smileys, lines, boxes, blocks, triangles, etc. could be used to add character to a text adventure game.
Shameless plug: I recently wrote a small toolkit to render CP437 characters on a HTML5 canvas for a retro-style game project I was working on.
Source: https://github.com/susam/pcface