The PG Hall of Fame: Prince of Persia: Harem Adventures

Back in 2002, Java mobile games were a brave and exciting new world. Really, they were.

Alongside the launch of operator portals like Vodafone Live, the idea of downloadable colour games – as opposed to Snake and other monochrome preloads – was hugely exciting, whether you were making or playing them.

And it's back in 2002 that Gameloft first came to prominence as a mobile games publisher, having started life as an online games portal, before a short-lived dalliance with PC games. One of its first big titles was Prince of Persia: Harem Adventures.

It seems a little funny looking back to a time when this sort of thing would make people's jaws drop, before asking, "What, THE Prince of Persia? On a phone?!" Nowadays we take this kind of conversion for granted.

Even so, that first game was groundbreaking, both in terms of its high production values, and because it showed off the potential of mobile to an often cynical game industry.

Plus it was mighty fun to play, of course. You played the Prince, running, jumping and dangling through a series of platform levels trying to rescue seven princesses (cynical types may trace the publisher's recent habit of offering women as unlockable trophies back to this, incidentally).

Gameloft would soon show that it had more strings to its bow than simply turning Ubisoft platform games into mobile hits, but Prince of Persia: Harem Adventures was still one of the key games that got it started.

Since then, it's been followed by a series of other Prince of Persia titles, each more graphically rich than the last. But we'll always have a place in our heart for this one, which helped kickstart the Java gaming habit that led us to this site.

It still has a product page on Gameloft's website, incidentally, for those wishing to give it a whirl.