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Lumines’ sales were modest – a little over half-a-million units were shifted in its first year on shelves and, as is tradition, the sales graph plotted a downward curve from there. At least until June 2007 when, twoand-a-half years after launch in Japan,

Lumines was used by hackers to trigger a buffer overflow in the PSP hardware, allowing unscrupulous types to bypass piracy protection and launch unsigned code from the device. Using a hacked Lumines save file, every PSP owner could do the same. The result? The game shot up almost 800 places in the Amazon PSP games chart, after sales rose by more than 13,000 per cent.