Agatha Christie has found a new lease of life as a video game heroine, with the “Queen of crime novelists” holding her own alongside sector stalwarts Lara Croft and Princess Zelda.

Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile, released as an internet download, has become one of the top ten games played on personal computers, the most popular platform for video games, figures released today show.

The title, based on the 1937 book in which Hercule Poirot unravels a murder onboard an Egyptian river cruise, has been downloaded 10 million times since April.

The title was released by Oberon Games, in association with IRM, the rights management group, and Agatha Christie Limited, a subsidiary of Chorion, the intellectual property company, whose other assets include Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men and Little Miss series.

The success of Death on the Nile comes as games publishers ramp up efforts to attract “non core gamers” in the wake of the success of Nintendo’s Wii console, a video games machine explicitly designed to appeal to “people who don’t like video games”.

More than 60 per cent of gamers are male, according to a recent survey by the Entertainment Software Association. But other research shows than more than three quarters of “casual gamers” – playing games predominantly downloaded from the internet to a PC – are female.

According to IRM, 60 per cent of the purchasers of Death on the Nile are women.

Don Ryan, of Oberon Media, the parent of Oberon Games, said: “The Agatha Christie stories and her audience are, as the figures show, a perfect fit for casual games, and we know that both mystery buffs and casual gamers are delighted with Death on the Nile.”

A recent study by DFC Intelligence, the researchers, predicts that by 2008 there will be nearly 200 million casual online gamers globally downloading between five and ten million games a day. Estimates suggest revenues for worldwide casual online gaming will be worth $2.5 billion by 2011.

Agatha Christie’s books have sold over a billion copies in the English language and another billion in over 45 foreign languages. She is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.

Jane Jensen, the designer behind Death on the Nile, said: “I’m pretty sure that we haven’t yet seen the last of Monsieur Poirot in the casual games world.”

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