Leo’s mom had yelled at him for using the phone line, but she was upstairs napping. The modem squealed like a tortured hamster. Finally: Download complete.

In the early 2000s, on a chunky beige Dell desktop running Windows 98, eight-year-old Leo watched the download bar crawl across the screen like a lazy inchworm.

Time remaining: 47 minutes

“He trapped me,” a voice crackled through the PC speaker. Not a game narrator. A tired, hoarse adult voice. “That’s not the real game. That’s a scraper . Version 1.1 wasn’t a patch—it was a prison.”

His mom never found out. But every Christmas after that, when the snow fell outside his window, Leo could have sworn he heard sleigh bells—and the faint, glitchy echo of a Windows 98 startup chime.

In its place: a tiny, animated Santa Claus, no taller than his thumb, running frantically across the screen. The Santa was pixelated—two red pixels for a hat, three for the beard—but his panic was unmistakable. He slammed his little fists against the edge of the monitor.

“Krampussoft,” the little Santa whispered. “They hijacked my distribution rights in ’02. Every time someone downloads that cursed ‘update,’ they overwrite another backup of me. There are only seven Santa backups left in the wild, kid. You just downloaded copy number… let’s see…” He pulled a tiny abacus from his belt. “Two. You got copy two.”

He’d found it on a shareware site called “FreeChristmasGames.ru”—a relic of the dial-up era, full of pixelated clip art and blinking Comic Sans banners. The description read: “Santa’s sleigh has crashed! Help him fix the rotor and deliver presents before Christmas morning! New in 1.1: Snow physics and reindeer stamina bar!”

Backup restored. Naughty/Nice ratio recalibrated. User: Leo. Status: Nice.