..It Still Can’t Make Pac-Man.

Type “make me Pac-Man” into a chatbot and, as of this month, you can play the result without leaving the conversation. ChatGPT’s new interactive responses can now build small, playable games directly in the chat window, and TechRadar has put it to the test, asking for Snake, Pong, Tetris, Space Invaders and Pac-Man, then adding a twist to each. Most of them worked first time.

It’s an impressive trick. It also says a lot about what made those games great in the first place, and how much of that can be copied.

What ChatGPT Actually Built

According to TechRadar’s Becca Caddy, all five classics came out recognisable and playable. Snake needed a second prompt after the first attempt produced code rather than a game, but Tetris, Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Pong ran straight away, with sensible controls and, in Pong’s case, three difficulty settings.

The twists were where it got interesting: a neon cyberpunk Snake with moving obstacles, a Tetris whose rules change every time you clear a line, a Space Invaders where you can choose to negotiate with the aliens between rounds, a Halloween-themed Pac-Man with a shifting maze, and a “chaotic” Pong that throws in a random modifier after every point. None of them would have taken more than a few minutes to make.

The Rules Are Easy. The Feel Isn’t.

Here’s the thing about the five games on that list: their rules fit on the back of a beer mat. Eat the dots, avoid the ghosts. Clear the lines. Shoot the aliens before they land. That simplicity is exactly why an AI can reproduce them, because there are thousands of clones, tutorials and open-source versions for it to have learned from.

But the rules were never what made them last. Pac-Man’s four ghosts don’t simply chase you. Blinky heads straight for you, Pinky aims for the space a few tiles in front of you, Inky’s target depends on where both you and Blinky are, and Clyde chases until he gets close, then loses his nerve and wanders back to his corner. All four switch between hunting you and retreating to their own corners on a timer. Toru Iwatani’s team spent months tuning that behaviour so the ghosts would feel like they had personalities, and it’s why a good Pac-Man player can read the maze rather than just run through it.

Space Invaders’ most famous feature was an accident. The fewer invaders left on screen, the less work the 1978 hardware had to do, so the survivors sped up, and Tomohiro Nishikado kept it in because the rising tension worked. A clone that simply makes the aliens faster as you go gets the effect, but not the reason it exists.

Those are the details that decide whether a game is still worth playing forty years later, and they’re the details a quick AI copy is most likely to flatten. “Recognisable” isn’t the same as “right”.

What It Means for the Fan Remake Scene

The retro community has a long tradition of rebuilding old games for new hardware, often with remarkable care. We’ve covered a few here, from the Punch-Out!! Game Boy Color remake to Pepsiman in your browser. Projects like those take months or years of work, much of it spent getting the small details right.

An AI that can rough out a playable version in seconds won’t replace that, but it does change the starting point. For hobbyists, it could be a genuinely useful sketchpad, a way to test an idea, like “what if Space Invaders had diplomacy?”, before committing to building it properly. For everyone else, it risks filling the internet with a flood of near-identical, slightly wrong versions of games that already exist.

Who Owns Pac-Man?

There’s also a question TechRadar’s piece doesn’t get into. These aren’t abandoned games. Pac-Man belongs to Bandai Namco, Tetris to The Tetris Company, Space Invaders to Taito, and rights holders have a long history of protecting them. A US court ruled in 2012, in Tetris Holding v. Xio Interactive, that a clone copying Tetris’s look and feel too closely infringed its copyright, and fan remakes of famous games are regularly taken down, Nintendo’s removal of the acclaimed fan-made Metroid remake AM2R being the best-known example.

Asking a chatbot to make a version of Pac-Man for your own amusement is one thing. What happens when people start sharing, selling or publishing those versions is another, and it’s a question the AI companies and the rights holders haven’t really answered yet. We’re not lawyers, and the answer will probably depend on how close a copy is to the original, but it’s worth thinking about before you put your “Haunted Pac-Man” on the internet.

Play the Real Thing

The best thing about this experiment might be what it reminds you of. If a chatbot’s five-minute Pac-Man made you smile, the original is better, and it’s easy to find. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Tetris are all available legally on modern consoles, PC and dedicated retro hardware, and our guide to every way to play classic games today covers the options from a few pounds upwards.

AI can now build a game that looks like Pac-Man. It took a team of people, a lot of playtesting and some lucky accidents to build one that still feels like Pac-Man in 2026, and that’s still worth playing properly.

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