GameReplica: A Benchmark for Black-Box Visual Game Replication by Vision-Language Agents

arXiv:2609.22308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coding-agent benchmarks usually evaluate implementation after the target behavior has been specified in text, code, or demonstrations. Existing research has extensively evaluated the ability of coding agents to generate programs from textual specifications. However, under black-box conditions where neither source code nor documentation is available, it remains underexplored whether an agent can induce the rules solely through visual observation and active interaction and reproduce the target system as a verifiable executable system. To this end, we present GameReplica, a closed-loop evaluation framework for end-to-end black-box game replication that covers the full perception, exploration, induction, reproduction, and verification pipeline. GameReplica comprises 125 tasks spanning 25 games across 5 core mechanism families, with each game instantiated at five difficulty levels. The tasks require an agent to access the target game only through screenshots and an action interface, induce the key visual elements and gameplay rules from pixel feedback and interaction outcomes, and generate a self-contained, runnable game replica that can be automatically verified by an external program. Experiments show that current coding agents still face substantial challenges in end-to-end black-box replication: the best-performing model (Claude Opus 4.8) achieves an overall score of 71.6%, while the remaining models score only 4.0%--42.9%. Further analysis reveals a consistent pattern across all models: visual-fidelity scores are substantially higher than implementation- and rule-consistency scores, indicating that agents replicate visual appearance more readily than game mechanics. The difficulty levels further amplify the performance gap: from L1 to L5, the overall score of weaker agents drops sharply, whereas that of the best-performing agent declines only slightly.