COMPUTER hackers yesterday spoilt Nokia’s Christmas after the world’s largest mobile phone company admitted that the secret codes for its N-Gage computer game player have been cracked, allowing the games to be downloaded for free over the internet.

Nokia, based in Finland, said its hopes for N-Gage to become a smash hit among young computer game fanatics over Christmas had been affected by news that anyone could play a pirated version of N-Gage games on handsets made by its rivals.

Club Siemens, a website devoted to the German company’s mobile phones, said: “The N-Gage games run very well on the Siemens SX1.” The site showed pictures of a Siemens phone displaying Nokia’s N-Gage logo and running the SonicN game.

The news is a huge blow to Nokia, which launched the N-Gage last month with hopes of selling as many as nine million units by the end of next year after a multimillion-pound marketing campaign.

The N-Gage is a mobile handset that doubles as a computer game platform. It is intended to be a rival to Nintendo’s GameBoy Advance.

Mark Squires, a Nokia spokesman, said: “We have found that some of the copy protection mechanisms of some game titles have been disabled and the games made available for download on various websites. Clearly we’re very disappointed and we take these types of intellectual property offences very seriously.”

Mr Squires added that Nokia had already stopped some websites from offering the pirated games.

The illegal downloads threaten not only sales of N-Gage handsets but also revenues from software sales.

“We are working to continually develop our copy protection mechanisms to make it even more difficult to do this in the future,” said Mr Squires.

Although Nokia said it did not know how many games had been downloaded, it did not expect the piracy to become widespread. Mr Squires said: “This is not something the average consumer can do. You need to have very specialised software tools and very specialised skills.”

He added that sales of N-Gage handsets had exceeded 400,000 in the first two weeks, and might already have passed one million, while more than 5,000 users every week were registering with the company’s website.

The hackers cracked the copy protection on the games, allowing them to be played on any handset powered by Nokia’s Series 60 operating platform. The software has been licensed by Samsung, Siemens and Sendo, the British handset maker.