# Vintage Computing Christmas Challenge 2025


It is often the small things in life that bring people together and allow communities to form. Community does not arise from uniformity, but from proximity — from shared interests and overlapping needs.

However, there is often a need for an external force to make these shared traits visible and bring them to life.

The Vintage Computing Christmas Challenge, or VC³ for short, is exactly that. Since 2021, it has brought together fans of a wide variety of vintage computer systems, programming enthusiasts and technology lovers. These people come together to compete in a shared challenge and inspire one another.

The idea is simple: generate an annually changing, predefined motif through program code that matches the given reference one-to-one.

In 2022, for instance, the task was to program a Christmas star. I later wrote a short GemLog entry about this challenge.

=> gemini://sdf.org/inermis/gemlog/20231126.gmi	Star Challenge, a nice programming exercise

A ranking is published after the submission deadline. This ranking is based on the smallest of the following values:
- source code
- file size
- actually executed code

Since any system (preferably retro systems) and any programming language are permitted, an absolute comparison is clearly impossible. But that is not the point, because at the heart of VC³ lies one thing above all else: the shared joy of the activity.

So, what is the challenge of VC³ 2025? The task is to program a snowflake. As in previous years, there is also a Wild Category. This category offers space for creative and free contributions centered around Christmas, including pictures, demos, and extended or entirely different ideas, with no counting restrictions or strict rules.

So let's get started! Anyone who would like to take part — and perhaps escape some pre-Christmas stress — can submit their entries until 18:00 CET on 24 December 2025.

Finally, I would like to thank the initiator, Logiker, for making VC³ possible year after year, thereby promoting exchange, creativity, and community.

Further information about the current challenge can be found here:

=> https://logiker.com/Vintage-Computing-Christmas-Challenge-2025