I tried this with DOOM. Fable 5 did a pretty shit job. Astra made pretty crazy animated sprites and was pretty good considering.
The fact that these are at all playable and 100x my programming skill level is pretty depressing from a certain pov. The ThreeJS dude posted ab how demotivated he was to continue his work, and while I was never a dev that did much with webgl, I commiserate.
My hope is that this drives a new generation of hyper creative content from those who don't give up. I mean, of course it does pacman well. Pacman and its clones have been done to the death over decades. But what if we ask AI to write finnegan's wake 2?
I don't think it makes sense to have the prompt be that short. This is basically a bench.ark of how models interpret an overly vague prompt. It should at least be "Create a pacman clone in a single html page. Make it faithful to the original" if that's what we're scoring it on.
It was something I randomly tested about a year ago, and no models handled it well, so whenever a new model came out, I tried it.
It has the advantage of taking good screenshots and letting me know if it’s decent within five seconds of playing.
I used to have it run a multi‑threaded MD5 checksum on S3 files, a trick I thought was pretty clever—but about a year ago they all started nailing it and outperformed me. So I needed something else.
Opus 5-5 seemed like a perfect clone, with others displaying flaws in an initial look. Astra notably created a bunch of surrounding ugly crap to look at.
Yes, Opus 5.5 is the first one that I don't have any notes on. It's just as impressive on other tasks I've given it over the last week. A clear step change.
I was just coming here to say this. I looked at all of them, and Opus 5.5 at high effort seems significantly better than every other clone.
Buffered controls, different pathfinding AI for each ghost, level transitions, etc.
Gpt-5.6 sol high technically completed the assignment as well, but the gaps within the pipes used to construct the maze, the lack of pause when eating a ghost, etc made it feel far less polished.
This prompt is a good way to test how well models fill in missing context because it's so nondescript. They're definitely improving.
Remember when people considered you a genius for prompting with "You are a skilled writer....".
That moment in time was physically painful.
Here's GLM-5.2: http://show.ahnfelt.net/demos/glm5.2-pacman.html
I need to add that one! It's the first one I've seen to have almost a drunk Pac-Man. It lags a little bit.
I tried this with DOOM. Fable 5 did a pretty shit job. Astra made pretty crazy animated sprites and was pretty good considering.
The fact that these are at all playable and 100x my programming skill level is pretty depressing from a certain pov. The ThreeJS dude posted ab how demotivated he was to continue his work, and while I was never a dev that did much with webgl, I commiserate.
My hope is that this drives a new generation of hyper creative content from those who don't give up. I mean, of course it does pacman well. Pacman and its clones have been done to the death over decades. But what if we ask AI to write finnegan's wake 2?
I wonder if we need better programming abstractions/ languages that can make programming easier for people.
It seems like a lot of the programming is cookie cutter type stuff (where these ai programs shine) and should be easier.
They can be amazing, but promoting “make a pac man game” seems like an exercise in which model has the best training code that was Pac-Man.
I don't think it makes sense to have the prompt be that short. This is basically a bench.ark of how models interpret an overly vague prompt. It should at least be "Create a pacman clone in a single html page. Make it faithful to the original" if that's what we're scoring it on.
Always assumed Pac-Man was an easy solve for modern AI. Guess those ghost patterns are trickier than they look for one-shot learning.
I did a variant of Pac Man using Claude and pointed it at a thorough blog post about the patterns and that greatly helped.
Recent and related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49882889
Curious if models grasp the ghost patterns or just react. Pac-Man's more complex than it seems for one-shot learning.
I'm curious; can you explain why you picked Pac-Man, in particular?
It was something I randomly tested about a year ago, and no models handled it well, so whenever a new model came out, I tried it.
It has the advantage of taking good screenshots and letting me know if it’s decent within five seconds of playing.
I used to have it run a multi‑threaded MD5 checksum on S3 files, a trick I thought was pretty clever—but about a year ago they all started nailing it and outperformed me. So I needed something else.
Opus 5-5 seemed like a perfect clone, with others displaying flaws in an initial look. Astra notably created a bunch of surrounding ugly crap to look at.
Yes, Opus 5.5 is the first one that I don't have any notes on. It's just as impressive on other tasks I've given it over the last week. A clear step change.
I was just coming here to say this. I looked at all of them, and Opus 5.5 at high effort seems significantly better than every other clone.
Buffered controls, different pathfinding AI for each ghost, level transitions, etc.
Gpt-5.6 sol high technically completed the assignment as well, but the gaps within the pipes used to construct the maze, the lack of pause when eating a ghost, etc made it feel far less polished.