The year was 2010 and I had a Google Nexus One in my hand, the first phone that felt properly futuristic. Live wallpapers were the new party trick. Most of them were gentle and pretty, little pieces of ambience that rippled or twinkled while you swiped between homescreens. I spent a week installing every free one under the sun and then stumbled across something different in the Android Market, what would later become the Play Store.

It was called Pixel Zombies Live Wallpaper by a developer called haydenTheAndroid (@haydenandroid). The screenshots looked like static at first glance, a grid with red, green and blue specks. Then I read the description and it clicked. Red were zombies, blue were hunters, green were civilians, and the whole thing was a living outbreak that played out behind your icons.

I bought it on the spot for $0.99, that lovely price point that felt like buying a packet of crisps rather than software. The moment it loaded I was hooked. Hundreds of tiny pixels were already moving, green dots milling about until a red cluster drifted close and chaos began. Civilians scattered, zombies chased, hunters lined up shots. You could double tap to drop a nuke and carve out a safe zone. It was simple, completely daft and utterly mesmerising.

I remember setting the brightness just right so my icons stayed readable, then losing minutes at a time watching the numbers in the corner tick up. Population, zombies, dead. A tiny war unfolding while I checked emails.

What really stuck with me was how it felt half screensaver, half toy. There was no story, yet stories formed anyway. A lone blue pixel would hold a street against a tide of red, then finally fall and join the horde. Sometimes the humans won, sometimes the infection rolled everything. When the full version arrived I loved that you could fiddle with the speeds and colours, even swap the background for satellite imagery so the outbreak crept over familiar roads. It was ridiculous and brilliant, the sort of throwaway idea that ends up living rent free in your head for years.

Phones moved on. Live wallpapers fell out of fashion a bit, and old favourites disappeared with them. But Pixel Zombies never really left me. Every now and then I would think about that silly grid and the tiny dramas playing out on it. I realised what I missed was not the phone trick but the feeling that my home screen was alive. It was a tiny simulation with just enough rules to surprise you, and it invited you to poke it, tune it and watch.

So here we are. I wanted to bring that feeling back in a way that anyone can run today, on a laptop or tablet or phone, without hunting down an ancient APK. A web page is perfect for it. Canvas for the pixels, a clean panel for the settings, the same colour key, the same double tap nuke. Keep the spirit, modernise the guts. It is a small love letter to that early Android era, to the Nexus One and the joy of paying $0.99 for something that made your device feel like magic. And selfishly, it is an excuse to watch those little dots chase each other around again, only this time I get to decide how it works under the bonnet.