Today I stumbled upon Microsoft’s 4K rendering of the Windows XP wallpaper

Did you read the news about the Windows XP activation algorithm getting cracked and suddenly get nostalgic for the blue skies and bluer taskbar of that old Windows release? Or maybe you just like attractive, high-resolution desktop wallpapers and you want to make a change? It turns out that Microsoft's design team has rendered an updated 4K version of the default Windows XP wallpaper—you might know it by its name, "Bliss."

It's one of several retro-themed wallpapers on this Microsoft Design site, including photorealistic renderings of Solitaire, Paint, and (of course) Clippy. The site has been around for a while and hasn't been updated since December 2022, but Windows engineer Jennifer Gentleman tweeted about it yesterday—it's new to me and maybe to you, too. The most recent wallpapers appear to be products of Microsoft's Design Week event.

Among others, the Microsoft Design site also hosts the default wallpapers that have come with several Surface PCs, quite a few Pride Month-themed wallpaper designs, and several images focused on the company's recent emoji redesigns and the icons for the Microsoft 365 apps.

While the updated Bliss image does appear to be a 3D rendering, it merely imitates the look and feel of the old Bliss photo without re-creating its every detail. As the sun was slowly setting on Windows XP's empire in the late 2000s, the artists Goldin+Senneby took a 1:1 re-creation of the then-grapevine-covered hill for an art installation piece called "After Microsoft." Widely circulated photos of the Bliss hill on fire in 2017 were ultimately revealed as a hoax.

Microsoft is fully aware of the nostalgia for its products among a certain segment of its userbase, people who miss the aesthetics of software from the early- to mid-'90s (and who also miss the time when advancements in computing were mostly exciting instead of mostly worrying). Nineties-themed ugly sweaters are an annual tradition for the company at this point, and in 2015 it launched "MS-DOS Mobile" as a fun joke to distract Windows Phone users as they waited for exciting new hardware and software that would never come.