What are your memories of Hugo? Is it on "What's Up, Doc", "Eleva2ren" or something else? Is his name Hugo, Hiudai, Kuzya or Tino? What do you make of this one-liner spouting troll? Have a shout about it in the comments, and thanks for watching!
Very nice video, respect :) You included HRT footage, oh man the memories. My brother and I would always cheer for other kids who were calling in. I don't remember parents letting us call because calls were so expensive, but it was entertaining nonetheless. And we still use quotes from that show xD
Haven't watched the whole video yet, but my saddest memory of Hugo so far (it was aired in Finland as well) is hearing a kid calling the show and actually trying to use a rotary phone to play.
Also, watching it this came to mind, we used to have a show called "Game Over" where people would play Jaguar games over the phone on a live show as well :)
Thank you for mentioning he's a marmite character. I was thinking "am I insane? He was so popular and yet I absolutely loathe him and cannot imagine buying anything with that face on it"
I played this on Croatian TV, in 1997. I won a gold Hugo medal, you needed certain amount of points for it. I won something else as prize as well but honestly dont remember what. Half of neighbourhood and my entire extended family came to watch me play. I was king for some time after that. I got different host then one you showed couple times in video, that was Kiki, I got Boris. There was also third host and her name was Ivana. I dont remember if they changed daily or weekly. Anyways Hugo was massive in Croatia, I am pretty sure it was most watched daily show in 90s.
Here in Argentina, I remember Hugo fondly on TV, alongside the Playstation version, which was mind-boggling for young me. The show went on for 9 years, easily outclassing any other attempts to capitalize on its success. The competition was still enjoyable to watch, but it never quite reached the same level as Hugo. Watching this video has dug out those great (and most likely biased) memories from childhood. Even though I attempted to participate yet never got called, the show was lots of fun and the host, alongside Hugo itself which was also there talking to the audience from a screen, carried it nicely. It never occurred to me that Hugo wasn't created in Argentina, but how impactful the IP was as a whole. Truly fascinating. Thanks for this retrospective! It was a blast to watch through.
I'm from Germany and I really loved Hugo. It was probably also because the show wasn't as stiff as most of the other game shows that were around at the time. Hugo was even one of the first two DOS games I ever bought - but I had real problems getting it to run. Fond memories.
Argentina, on top of airing Hugo, had it's own take on the concept called Kito Pizzas (airing on the same channel Hugo did), though it was mostly a 3D platformer fare with some ocassional different bits of gameplay (they even tried telltale style dialogue options in one portion!). Sadly there's not a whole lot of archived footage of it, and what there is amounts to home recordings of awful quality. I was always really sad that they never made it into an actual proper game to play at home (our own videogame industry has not gotten too far yet), but the art direction and design displayed in Kito Pizzas was truly, extremely 2000s latinamerican cheese and I miss it so much.
I’m a Dane. I was a Young teen During the ninetees . I watched him on eleva2eren (a pun on elevator and 2’nd. The network was Called tv2) great memories. Thanks Kim ❤️
I had Oswald as a PD game on my Amiga, quite a fun little game, pity I didn't know the language as it gave the message "SLUT" on game over, which amused adolescent me!
The original Danish name, skærmtrolden Hugo is probably a pun! Skærmtrolden basically sounds like charmetrolden (charm troll), which is an expression for someone who is extremely charming in a quote way in the Nordic languages. Often used when describing children or pets. Roughly translated it would be the super charming (screen troll) Hugo.
Agreed! I think I also heard somewhere that “skærmtrold” used to refer to someone who was always glued to their TV screen (though, I’m pretty sure it’s rarely if ever used in that sense today), so I think that’s part of the pun, too!
My only prior exposure to Hugo was Retro Pals being dismayed every single time he'd pop up on a PS1 retrospective, and learning the games were designed for a phone call-in game make a good bit of sense. Thanks for the history of this series!
Hugo was HUGE in my region, and I was a huge fan as a kid. The holy trinity of mascots for me was Rayman, Sonic and Hugo (yeah screw Mario). And here's an unpopular opinion: Some of his later 3D "traditional" games were pretty good as well, like The Evil Mirror and the kart racer "Buckazoom Race" which was offroad focused.
Hi Kim, thanks for this awesome stroll down memory lane. I have very fond memories about Oswald & Hugo from TV here in Denmark. I knew Hugo was huge abroad, but not this huge. I did eventually manage to get my grubby mits on a C64 cassette edition of SuperOswald and later on various Hugo games on the glorius Amiga. A funny thing about the original Hugo (in the mines) was that it was a pretty game, but it had no replay value as the map you explored wasn't randomized on subsequent game loads. But very fun times overall :D Given its success in the past, I find it pretty odd there has been no Hugo releases in the 2020s
Man, Hugo was HUGE in Turkey: A tv show, its own magazine, coloring books, toys... Heck, I even went to a live Hugo stage play back in the day. It was basically the tv show's (Turkish version's) presenter "against" the evil witch from Hugo (a.k.a. a random, probably underpaid lady in a costume). Hugo himself was projected to a huge screen on the background. At a certain point, they even made the audience "play" various Hugo games, which essentially meant a bunch of kids screaming "RIGHT", "LEFT", "JUMP" on top of their lungs and Hugo on the screen following suit. It was a lot of fun, I remember absolutely loving it. I even managed to get my picture taken with the presenter, mr. Tolga after the show! Too bad a kid vomited on his shirt literally a minute later, so they had to finish the picture taking part of the show early. 😂 Seriously, you have no idea how happy this made me. Thank you so much.
Hugo was in Finland, too. While my family were staying at a Ski Resort cottage in Lapland and watching Hugo, I was totally caught off guard when my neighbor happened to be on the show. He won a Super Nintendo (people almost never won, I remember). The input latency must've been horrible. The witch antagonist was much like the one in Battletoads. Also, I remember thinking the hostess was very cute, even though I was still a few years from starting elementary school.
Here in Finland we also had Game Over where a hand puppet host Vito let people play 3DO games on a phone. Often it was just some minigolf games. They tried also Super Nintendo games with phone controls but it was horrible. I remember seeing one kid trying to play Donkey Kong Country with that horrible lag and phone controls. 😅
Hugo was not big here on Brazil, but was relativelly well know. I remember seeing children playing it on telephone on TV shows for some time. By the time we already was playing SNES games, we cleary saw that Hugo game was simple, but seing these graphics on TV was a bit impressive. Hugo indeed have his place in our 90s game memory. I did not know all the hisory behind it, thanks again for another greate Documentary about this piece of game history, your videos are always informative (and fun too, I like it).
I’m a Dane, I was a kid during the late 90’s-early 2000’s. I was a Big Hugo-fan, having multiple of his games on PC and Playstation. He was everywhere back then with multiple merchandise as well. A big part of why many people lost on the TV-show was because the phone-system meant there would be a small delay between inputs. That was often why you could hear players press the buttons rapidly. Thanks for the nostalgia-trip, Kim ❤
In Finland we had Hugo and it was huge. After Hugo, we had a show called Game Over, a show hosted by a horrible looking handpuppet called Vito. the show used 3DO console as it's base and suffered many malfunctions during it's run and left many kids calling in disappointed after waiting an hour to get through to the actual broadcast.
I'm from Vietnam. Watching people try their luck on TV, I always thought that I could easily perform better than most of them, having no concept of input lag. Although even kid me knew the final luck base segment at the end of a run was pretty much rigged. This was a huge part of my childhood, thank you for covering it.
I'm Canadian, and I've never seen or heard of Hugo until emulation became a thing. He's a very difficult character to understand without context, so thank you for this. I just assumed he was some foreign cartoon character and his games were all just licensed shovelware.
I'm from Sweden, and I never played those games, but I remember seeing them om TV shows were kids made the call to play them. And seeing footage of some of these games again made tears flowing from my eyes like two waterfalls! Considering how many game characters from the late 1980's and early 90's getting a comeback in one form or another, I think it's about frickin' time Hugo came out of retirement!
Here in Poland, Hugo was probably the biggest kids' franchise from 2000 to around 2003. He was everywhere, to the point they got cocky and started making jabs at other family-friendly franchises (like Pokemon).
True, although it's worth mentioning that it ran much longer: between 2000 and 2009. There's an interesting piece on YT made by (seemingly inactive now) Retrostrzał about Polish version of Hugo, which is basically an hour long interview with almost all the actors/TV presenters and voice actors involved throughout the years. Unfortunately it doesn't have English captions so it's of no value for Kim whatsoever.
One thing Hugo games are known for are the funny death animations and voices. Something very similar to that are the Die O Ramas in Crash Tag Team Racing.
As a dane born in the 80's this bring's back memories. Remember playing Oswald on my amiga. I remember every friday watching Eleva2ren with my familie. Think that was pretty normal at that time and Kim if you watch this guldkorn expressen is another danish game for the amiga. Its a hidden gem. Forgot to say thank you for all the great content.
Ah this was my childhood 😃. Hugo the Troll was part of the best computer games to play, and I loved watching on TV when people called-in to play....and sometimes a little mock the kids who I thought playing bad (later realised a lot of it could be caused due to poor tele-connection and lagg). And then over the years playing home console ports on PS1, PS2 and PC. Heck I own some Hugo figures, his plane radio controlled with cord and a plush figure.🧸 Sad how the franchise went south and now we only see him in some poor in-game-purchase games 🃏 and darn casino games 🎰 🙁
20:41 oh man, I owned half of these games in the early 2000s, for me they served as an introduction to arcade gaming world. Yeah, we did have a TV show in Russia back in the 90s, but I never called there or anything (our family was so poor we couldn't afford a phone in the house), but its catchphrase stuck. Но игра продолжается, позвоните Кузе!
I remember I watched Hugo's phone game courses during one of a german kid TV channel called "Super RTL". It was a great experience for me to watch the caller try to get through one of the obstacle courses. 🙂 Although I didn't see a similar phone game in any hungarian TV shows, it's good to see there are game console and PC ports of those mini games.
Funny how we had the exact same experience. Also from Hungary, also saw Hugo on Super RTL. I was mesmerized by the phone game back then :) Didn't think any other Hungarian kid knew about Hugo, lol.
Being American, I find it fascinating when I discover an entire global media phenomenon that reached dozens of countries and stayed popular for over a decade but had absolutely no impact in the United States whatsoever.
It's rare that people bother invading through your Iron Curtain to tell you about it, considering they quick get told that the entire world is pathetic, for constantly talking about USA and American culture. You know, a nation that doesn't understand that only 340 million have that passport and 700 million DON'T, they're just ACTUAL Americans. That's why they know Latin languages like doctors and lawyers, NATIVELY. That is the language that spreads all this "Western culture", English is just like the common baby talk version of it. The curio about global culture like Spanish conquistadors and Japanese ninja, is the way how USA always takes that stuff from Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone and rebrands them with their in-house creators like Tarantino and Lucas. Then goes around telling everyone that Batman or Master Yoda is an "american" invention, because you BAN the Fu-Manchu it's actually based on as "racist".
Eurovision Song Contest is something to check out. WWTBAM was big in the US once but you may not be aware it's essentially the McDonald's of Game Shows, it's been everywhere and still running in a ton of countries (Jeopardy is not popular outside North America).
As a french, the game is pretty notorious here also. Everyone from the time remember the interactive TV show, mostly thanks to the attractive show host, ahah. It was called "Hugo Delire" (something you can translate to "Frenzy Hugo"). But to my knowledge we didn't have very much besides the games (no animated show, etc).
In Turkey, one of the children that remotely connected to the game swore to Hugo when he couldn't make a jump or something like that. While that moment is claimed to have been witnessed by many people, the show presenter denied that this ever happened. Since there is no record of that particular program, it is still not certain if it is an urban legend, Mandela effect or it actually happened.
Finally, someone has delved into the history of Hugo in a high-quality documentary style, and who better than the incredible Kim Justice! I was a kid in Germany in the 90s and loved watching the show on TV. Just a few years ago, my sister and I played through one of the Hugo games on PS1 for nostalgia's sake. Thank you!
One of the most weird things about Hugo is how good the soundtrack for Hugo 2 PS1 is. It is WAY better than the game itself and i would go as far as saying it is one of the best game soundtracks ever. I dont know how that happened, but i know that it did.
Interesting vid Kim. And im immediately reminded, as a brit, having only seen Hugo swinging from a noose for a few seconds in "Budbrain Megademo 2" and having no context whatsoever until around a decade later.
At least two of the guys from BudBrain worked at ITE (who made the Hugo games). One was my boss there at one point. Many who worked there became tired of Hugo and just wanted him to die ;)
@@BarrySlisk Hahah! Not surprised at all! I once hid an easter egg in a cd-rom project I worked on where you could blow the product up if you clicked on the right areas of the screen at the right time.
I recall TG4, the one Irish Language channel I am aware of, still doing Hugo stuff till I was around 12 or 13, which would've been around 05 or 06. Thought it was native due to the Irish Language itself being there and it being a major part of TG4's branding even a bit after they stopped using him on their programming.
My memory of Hugo is framed primarily by the 2000s PC game releases from Hugo Jungle Island onward, whether it be the early 2000s Jungle Island minigame collections released or some of the more standalone titles that came out at the time, such as Hugo: The Magic Oak and especially Hugo: The Magic Journey. These experiences were primarily in Czech, and trying to figure out whether or not Hugo appeared on Czech TV gave me nothing, with 'Hugo - Dobrodružství v džungli' being utterly dominated by results for the video game releases instead (so unless something missing, Hugo was just a game franchise in Czechia); meanwhile, in my native Serbia, just as he had appeared on Croatian TV, he appeared on Serbian TV during his Jungle Island incarnation, with 'Hugo: Ostrvo džungle'. Hugo's appearance in Serbia would actually inspire Belgrade-based studio Fun Factory (otherwise known as Janus Interactive, which had previously contributed on TV quiz shows 'Kešolovac' and 'Lova za slova') create its own take on the format, first developing Secret Agent Izzy (Tajni agent Izzy) and then Bunga Banga Re, existing in some form on Serbian airwaves up to 2009. In 2009, Fun Factory helped launch several SMS prize giveaway programs on Serbian TV, but one of the leads behind Fun Factory, Predrag 'Peđa' Bećirić, ended up in conflict as a result of his attempts to prove the games weren't simply games of chance (with the State Lottery of Serbia believing otherwise, thus making them fall under their jurisdiction). Attempting to prove that they were in fact not games of chance, and also discovering that, in his eyes, the State Lottery didn't communicate the rules of the SMS prize giveaways properly (thus leaving players in a disadvantage), Bećirić organized a group and, utilizing a simple method, partook in the giveaways, winning like 5 apartments and 125 cars, though hiring folks to accept the prizes in their stead. For this, Bećirić was arrested in March 2010, and later he and 17 co-conspirators were sentenced to four and a half years in prison in 2016, though that verdict was later revoked in 2017. Today, Bećirić seems to be working for an unrelated Turkish-run Janus Interactive which currently develops a World War 2-themed crypto/NFT play-to-earn F2P mobile game. I still remember years ago when a 3D comeback movie for Hugo was announced, but I don't think anything came of that.
I think Hugo was helped in Germany by its hot young hosts, actresses like Judith Hildebrandt, Sonja Zietlow or Minh-Khai Phan-Thi helped the show massively. I remember one episode of Sonja declaring before the episode started she was wearing a mini skirt, and the camera trying to catch a peak for the whole runtime of the show. The 90s were a different time The last Hugo game for a console was Hugos Spielewerkstatt, released in 2009(!) for the PS2, 12 years after the end of the Hugo Show. But then we also had 23 years of Moorhuhn games. Now that would be a topic, that game was called a danger to german work productivity because everyone was hunting Moorhühner.
Jesus Christ, how many licences got slapped on those Crazy Castles games? I count Micky Mouse, Roger Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, Garfield, Real Ghostbusters, Woody Woodpecker and now Hugo.
I am a Danish game developer who as a child was allowed to stay up a little extra so that I could see Hugo being played on TV. So quite fun watching your video here. It was also quite funny to hear you try to pronounce our Æ. It is not quite easy. ;)
my only experience of hugo was on a gameboy multicart with hugo 2, I remember really liking the snowboarding game with the faux FPS encounters with the snowmen.
Thank you for covering this danish classic. I watched Oswald, Super Oswald and Hugo in Eleva2ren, and I later played the Amiga and PC releases of those games. Unfortunately, the PC release of the original Hugo mine-navigation game is extremely difficult to come by. Subsequent releases can be found online, but typically in the German dubbed versions :(
I am a Dane from the early 90's. My parents taped the Hugo segments from Eleva2ren for me, because I was obsessed with Hugo. I watched it, I had it on as background noise, I fell asleep to it, I wore that tape down until some segments looked like abstract video-art. Funny how it is exactly how people watch let's plays now, just way back before you even could upload videos to the internet. Thanks for the nostalgia fix.
I’m a little too young to have watched Hugo on TV, but I’ve played the games from the TV show plenty of times, as they got PC ports sometime in the 2000s, and they were dirt-cheap here in Denmark! The family PC wasn’t too up-to-date, so Hugo was one of the only things it played xD Those games and the Volcano Island series (which consisted of two minigame compilations released in the late 90s, featuring a few games from the TV show, as well as some that were more tailored for PC) made me a bit of a Hugo addict, and I played both the platformers and the Agent Hugo series religiously 😅 I seem to remember RoboRumble, the second Agent Hugo game, being a pretty fun little rail shooter, and because I was so into Hugo, I actually entered a contest to win the third Agent Hugo game, Lemoon Twist! That game was kinda experimental, if memory serves? It gave Hugo a bunch of gadgets to use, and was also kind of a collectathon? I didn’t get too far as a kid - don’t think my baby brain could figure it out xD Hearing about Hugo’s origins was wild! I really enjoyed this look back at the series ✨
Thanks Kim! It has been bothering me for YEARS what the name of the football game they played on T.I.G.S. on CITV was. Crazy Cartoon Soccer! I can see though why it is not as well remembered now - a quick google of the stereotypical characters you used to control have not aged well!
Swede here who fondly remembers Hugo, how dull the reflexes of everyone playing seemed to be (I did not know...) and who is hoenst to god baffled that it was so popular even outside of Europe. I feel like I haven't really seen that popularity, seen references to Hugo or deep dives until this one (except for one Danish guy whose videos I follow). Seeing just how massive they were and realizing it made so much money it more or less spawned the Danish videogame industry, I have to confess. I am very impressed, and very eager to give Hugo his true flower and props. To think you were this big all along... Also liked the segment talking about how this was one of the first big "online" attempts with video games, or a way that really turned games into something so mainstream it could become a "game-show". Never really thought about these games as pushing any kind of technological development, and I was clearly in the wrong there.
I'm German and personally I never saw Hugo on TV, he was entirely a videogame character to me. A friend in elementary school had a few Hugo games for his PC that we played a bunch.
As someone who grew up in argentina seeing this hugo character as a kid ii enjoyed it a lot even if i was watching people playing it, there was also another 'TV Game' like Kito Pizza which was all in 3D around my country, it feels good to have a comprehinsible history about hugo in general, i never knew about OsWALD before but i am glad to learn about his existence now. Fantastic informative video!
Thanks for the shoutout - I always keep an eye out for the originals of these to see if we could ever preserve the TV versions of these through the likes of MAME or similar. For what it's worth, I was always more a Hugo fan than Joe Razz - as a bit of a laserdisc nerd, I tend to prefer those games with a meaningful interactive layer as opposed to glorified scene selects and QTEs. A quick mention as someone just a little older than Kim - the original Motormouth interactive game of choice, if you can believe it, was Weird Dreams on the Amiga - I can't think of anything harder to handle with lag etc, even if it is a hair simpler than the regular version.
That was a good one. In 1998 i played this on live tv and got the basic prize: sticker, shirt and bag for completing the swimming game. By that time we had Hugo on one channel and MTV had the tech for a show with their own characters, Throut & Neck. While Hugo was for kids and the host was a cute lady, on the mtv side the show had tons of cursing (it was at 5 pm) and the host was João Gordo, vocalist of the punk rock band Ratos de Porão. You can find him today in the channel Panelaço, the story of his life is quite awesome. A few months after i played it someone bought the Hugo game for the Playstation and it really was the same but with a lot better gameplay. On tv i always tought how annoying it was that the host was all the time screaming the next command we should press. After i noticed the tv had a 5 seconds delay i tried to listen but still lost one life.
I used to play Hugo Classic #1, Hugo: The Bewitched Rollercoaster and Hugo: The Magic Journey when I was a kid. According to Kim Frederiksen (Psycho), Crionics was annoyed that Budbrain beat them because they came in second place in the Amiga Conference 1990 Amiga Demonstration Competition after Budbrain Megademo, and they were used to winning, so they decided to mock Budbrain. One of the main people working at Crionics was a graphics artist named Madonna Freak. Frederiksen and Rene Bidstrup (Diablo) decided to do Budbrain Megademo II's storyline where Nikki Finn (Madonna's character in Who's That Girl) is stabbed to death in a parody of Psycho as a jab at Crionics. They were also becoming fed up with Hugo the Troll and feeling jealous that they were not working for SilverRock Productions (later Interactive Television Entertainment) at the time. They decided to 'take the p**s' by revealing Hugo as Nikki's/Madonna's killer, who is sentenced to death by hanging as the Twin Peaks theme song plays, but at the same time utilise it to show off their work. Bidstrup drew Hugo from scratch himself instead of stealing graphics from the game show. Because of this, the two got to work for ITE, working on the MS-DOS version of the video game. Frederiksen does not like Budbrain Megademo II because unlike the original Budbrain Megademo that was made in a year, this was made in three months and not as well thought through. The demonstration also received criticism for having more text than animation. Budbrain was disliked by the elite demosceners because of their silly style that could be interpreted as mocking the scene, and they thought that they got away with the Crionics jab too easy and did not show that they could do six more sprites than 'the other guy'. Budbrain decided to go for a more creative approach, and felt that the demonstration was to show how good the programmer was. It had nothing to do with the graphics artist, music, scripting, concept or continuity, it was really a showcase of the programmer's work. They took the programmer down to the level of the graphics artist and the music and lifted everything to the same level, so they had a lot of detractors. Flash Production made Budbrain Megademo III, which Frederiksen considers 'really terrible' and 'made super-bad on purpose', though he appreciates the work put into it. Despite their backlash, Budbrain also had their fans. Frederiksen received a lot of mail (with disks inside) from all over the world outside his house after staying at his parents' for three weeks during the summer. Due to not making money from their work and fame, Frederiksen could not afford to write back to the fans as it would have cost him a fortune, much to their anger, which kind of killed his interest in training with video games and demonstrations. Sources: demozoo.org/productions/2020/ demozoo.org/productions/104336/ th-cam.com/video/AjpLXAsypl4/w-d-xo.html www.dtkdesign.co.uk/interview-with-kim-frederiksen-aka-psycho-from-budbrain/ (47:40-51:07, 51:08-52:08, 52:09-53:56, 53:57-54:30)
I think I remember Wally Winger showing off him being the English dub voice of Hugo in his visual reel; funnily enough, he also voiced Throg in "Throg & Neck" as well.
"Left him due to long working hours". That's a weird reason for breaking up. But I doubt it was the real one. My friend had Hugo on the Amiga, plus a rudimentary recording setup. We had fun recording our own episodes of the tv-show. One of us would be the host, and the others played increasingly eccentric callers. I'm sure some if the recordings survive, but they're best left as good memories. Our 15year olds humor would be cringy to listen to now 😅
Thanks for the quality captions. I remember this little guy from cable tv in latin america in the early 2000s, I thought playing in live tv while on a regular house phone was the peak of technology
I was a small boy on Chile about 5 years old when hugo eas show in the public tv channel. This was about 1995. Yu have used some images of the show on the video and It brings a lot of memories... Greetings from Chile
So cool to see you finally covering the Hugo series. Growing up in Denmark, I remember catching Hugo on TV many time and my mom would record a lot of the episodes for me. I would always get annoyed when some boomer would call in and not be to play the game properly xD Although I have no idea how bad the lag between the phone and the "live" transmission actually was so tha might have played in. Which was likely also why the Hugo games usually gave you a somewhat generous window for error. It is kinda interesting that the demographic over here who would originally call in was older people compared to the rest of the world were it was usually kids. However, that would also be the case over here later on after Eleva2eren ended it's run. Hugo really was a national phenomenon though. In Denmark around Christmas, there will always be a 24-episode long TV Christmas calender and I remember one episode in particular where the protagonist (a Christmas elf living in a archive) accidentally use a magic spell to transfer himself and his girlfriend into the office's new computer and they end up in the labyrinth Hugo game. They even gave him a very well-animated sprite. As a kid I always wanted to play that but I doubt it was actually real gameplay. It did incapsulate how big Hugo was around the time. You can see the segment here if you fancy: th-cam.com/video/GMt0M7t7wXw/w-d-xo.html (Assumming i hasn't been taken off) The antagonist "Afskylia/Repulsia/Scylla" always kinda reminded me of the Dark Quen from Battletoads xD I also don't know what was up with the name Hugo around that time cause one of the biggest animated movies coming out of Denmark through the 90s also carried that name "Jungledyret Hugo / The Jungle Animal Hugo" about this one-of-kind animal that someone tries to kidnap from the jungle and he ends up in the big city "likely Copenhagen" I even remember them also doing a short segment in Eleva2eren where the two Hugos would inetact. I sadly never got to own a lot of Hugo games as a kid. I believe I had the labyrinth one of diskette at some point but the one I remember the most was that lazy Crazy Castle 2 reskin or the Game Boy. I do believe "Hugo 2" and "Hugo 2½" on Game Boy/Color WAS in fact a proper conversion of the older Amiga games, which I really wish I had gotten instead. Although while I could be wrong, I do believe both of those games were German exclusives. Also, very random trivia but I walked past a really old Chinese take-away place some time ago and they had this old ice cream poster on the wall. They didn't actually sell any ice cream so it's likely that it has been on that wall for the last 30 years and they never bothered to remove it, but on that poster there was actually a Super Oswald ice cream. I thought that was interesting. I don't believe Hugo ever got the ice cream treatment but I could be wrong. I also have to stress just how lazy the names of both Hugo and Oswald's girlfriends' names are. In Denmark Donald Duck is Called Anders And and Daisy called Andersine, so I imagine they applied the same logic. Also, I doubt any girl in Denmark have ever actually carried eithe rof these 3 names xD
Oh my gosh, I used to think Jungledyret Hugo and Skærmtrolden Hugo were related somehow! I had no idea they were on TV together - granted, I’m a little too young to have watched Eleva2ren 😅 But I remember that segment from Pyrus! And I’m really glad to see I’m not the only one who made the connection with the names 😅 I think they did about the same thing with Hugo and Hugoline’s kids, Rit, Rat, and Rut - pretty sure they’re derived from Huey, Dewey, and Louie’s Danish names (Rip, Rap, and Rup). Though, if that’s the case, I think it’s a little lazy that they just carried over the names as-is in the English translation - the reference is lost entirely xD
Thanks to Hugo us sweds got Rummel och Rabalder, two puppets controlled by strings. They we're also part of this genre, with a game you could play in Lattjo lajban, with your phone.
"Ich fühl mich wie Indiana Jones" damn, as a kid I thought he was pretty funny. Always watched the show, don't think I ever tried to get on their myself, but my cousin had one of the games on CD-Rom
Hugo was a game show? How many children's game shows were on TV in the 80s and 90s!? Because I'm starting to get a little annoyed at how they all ended before I was old enough to even think about competing on one!
Played a surprising amount of Danish PC games as a kid despite not living there, Hugo being one of my favorites. Guess their games just had a ton of appeal to rest of Europe at the time like their educational games.
I had a pirated danish (I'm not in Denmark) copy of Hugo for PC back in the early 90s. Super fun games. We even had our own show here in Slovenia, but that was back in the day when DTMF phones were still somewhat new.
Truly inspiring that what are genuinely some of the most unappealing character designs I've ever seen broke out of being what most people would consider shovelware to become... more shovelware. AMAZING what Europeans will eat if you put it in front of them.
I never played Hugo's games, but i do remember i first saw him with that agent Hugo game, and later on, i would see him again with that localisation of that Game Boy game.
I remember this being on TV when I was a teenager and owned an Amiga 500. And it always seemed kind of cool, at the time, to think that the computers being used for this game on the TV was also the Amiga. I remember trying out the home version and not thinking too highly of it.
Hugo was part of my childhood, but it was kinda hard to watch because the channel that aired here in Brazil was hard to tune in clearly (aaaaah, the good old days), so when I discovered the PS1 conversions (one of them at least) in 99 or 2000 (don't recall exactly when), and despite being simplistic... It was cheaper than using the phone on the TV days (seriously, phones here in Brazil in the 90's were a luxury that poor families couldn't afford).. Banger video, as always.
Hugo was also big in Sweden. The first commercial TV channel in the country, that started nationwide broadcasts in the early 1990s (before that there was only state television), TV4, had Hugo in various morning kid's shows throughout the 90s.
The Amiga demo crew Budbrain did an animation of Hugo being hanged in their second demo, it's called the trial and you can see it at 8 minutes into the demo. He is convicted of the murder of Madonna. (Sorry Crionics). I know my Amiga demo history and I NEED to get out more...........Great video Kim!!
Unfortunately Hugo wasn't a big hit here in Brazil like it was in other countries. Perhaps if the show was aired by a more prestigious TV channel (like TV Globo or SBT) it would have had a more significative impact.
The success of Hugo from such a small country reminds me a lot of the success of Norway's stop-motion masterpiece "The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix" from 1975.* It is well known among stop motion aficionados and sold more tickets in Norway than there are people in Norway! It's somewhat hard to find, especially in NTSC format for those of us in the western hemisphere, but well worth it for fans of the genre. There was actually a 3D game made for it fairly recently too: th-cam.com/video/vspkymea-fM/w-d-xo.htmlsi=qVcerxZl4R1wcWUP * Here's a trailer for the movie: th-cam.com/video/q5MF6OocKPg/w-d-xo.htmlsi=VBugfgZY54GAn6f4
I was a kid here in Germany in the 90's and I can confirm Hugo was huuuuuge. Also, I really always wanted to play the PC games and honestly, I had lots of fun for a long time :) Sure, coming back now as adult make me think these are super simple games but it is fun for younger kids :)
I remember Hugo being a pretty popular segment here in Argentina in the mid to late 90's, if I'm not wrong it had its own show in cable TV. I never got to play because I knew that calls from my province either weren't elegible for the game or just never got through, can't remember which one exactly, back then I had not idea of what input lag was but retrospectively it makes a lot of sense that trying to play a game over a telephone from a thousand kilometers away was just not feasible. Now I'm kinda curious about tracking down the games and trying them on an emulator. BTW watching this much nicer gameplay footage made me realize of just how low the color depth of these games was, the prerendered 3D elements really show the limitations of the Amiga pallete, but back in the day CRTs did a great job of hiding those imperfections.
Turkish/German ex-kid here: totally LOVED hugo, always wanted to call there - not allowed. Never got the games either hahaha... But god damn, Hugo is just burned into my memory. I looked up Hugo and his whereabouts a few months ago and was SHOCKED how long they made games with that character. But damn, due to russian neighbours and being from turkey, i KNEW that he was bigger than "Kabel 1" , like he was everywhere. And not gonna lie, some of those mini-games look actually still fun. (Like how i would now look at WarioWare or a smartphone game). I wonder if you could salvage Hugo in some sort of adventure-revival. Its like Moorhuhn (aka Crazy Chicken?), where i saw some sort of redemption with Moorhuhn Kart or that Jump and Run game... But yeah, it would need some skilled studio - maybe Playtonic implementing him as a secret character in a Yooka Laylee game? idk. But yeah, what a trip.
Wow. Nostalgia. Yeah, Hugo was on TV shows when I was a kid where viewers would phone in and control the character through key presses. I always wondered what that game was as I never saw it on consoles.
As much early childhood nostalgia I have for Hugo and "Æh, hvor skal vi hen du" (Pretty much a danish translation of Bugs Bunnys What's up, doc"), and as proud I am as a Dane of this groundbreaking piece of entertainment technology, I feel it's a plague, with all the slot games, and clearly cynical cash grab video games. Dare I say it, he's pretty much the 90's Danish equivalent to Crazy Frog, even if that is clearly much worse
I had no idea Hugo was a big deal. Just remember playing some of the ancient CD-rom games of my fathers on his old computer. I remember having a lot of fun with them.
In Indonesia we... never encountered him on TV. I even thought he is a bootleg character or something since he appeared often among the pirated PS1 games. Didn't know he was this big of an influence!
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What are your memories of Hugo? Is it on "What's Up, Doc", "Eleva2ren" or something else? Is his name Hugo, Hiudai, Kuzya or Tino? What do you make of this one-liner spouting troll? Have a shout about it in the comments, and thanks for watching!
Definitely "what's up doc" - though said memories were definitely buried prior to this vid reminding me they existed (& more importantly, why 😅)
Very nice video, respect :) You included HRT footage, oh man the memories. My brother and I would always cheer for other kids who were calling in. I don't remember parents letting us call because calls were so expensive, but it was entertaining nonetheless. And we still use quotes from that show xD
Haven't watched the whole video yet, but my saddest memory of Hugo so far (it was aired in Finland as well) is hearing a kid calling the show and actually trying to use a rotary phone to play.
Also, watching it this came to mind, we used to have a show called "Game Over" where people would play Jaguar games over the phone on a live show as well :)
Thank you for mentioning he's a marmite character. I was thinking "am I insane? He was so popular and yet I absolutely loathe him and cannot imagine buying anything with that face on it"
Here in Argentina Hugo also had his own show on Magic Kids, a kids' channel, and the girl who hosted it is still a celebrity today
Thanks so much for the shoutout Kim! Excellent work as always :)
No problem
Two great tastes that taste great together!
I played this on Croatian TV, in 1997. I won a gold Hugo medal, you needed certain amount of points for it. I won something else as prize as well but honestly dont remember what. Half of neighbourhood and my entire extended family came to watch me play. I was king for some time after that. I got different host then one you showed couple times in video, that was Kiki, I got Boris. There was also third host and her name was Ivana. I dont remember if they changed daily or weekly.
Anyways Hugo was massive in Croatia, I am pretty sure it was most watched daily show in 90s.
This is so awesome. Thsnks for sharing
Because I'm sure some people will be wondering, "slut" is Danish for "end" or "finish".
Here in Argentina, I remember Hugo fondly on TV, alongside the Playstation version, which was mind-boggling for young me. The show went on for 9 years, easily outclassing any other attempts to capitalize on its success. The competition was still enjoyable to watch, but it never quite reached the same level as Hugo.
Watching this video has dug out those great (and most likely biased) memories from childhood. Even though I attempted to participate yet never got called, the show was lots of fun and the host, alongside Hugo itself which was also there talking to the audience from a screen, carried it nicely. It never occurred to me that Hugo wasn't created in Argentina, but how impactful the IP was as a whole. Truly fascinating.
Thanks for this retrospective! It was a blast to watch through.
I'm from Argentina, and Hugo was a giant here, everyone remembers him.
I'm from Germany and I really loved Hugo. It was probably also because the show wasn't as stiff as most of the other game shows that were around at the time. Hugo was even one of the first two DOS games I ever bought - but I had real problems getting it to run. Fond memories.
Sky really went all-in on live interactive shows, with Gamesworld Live presented by Jeremy Daldry, But it only lasted one series.
Argentina, on top of airing Hugo, had it's own take on the concept called Kito Pizzas (airing on the same channel Hugo did), though it was mostly a 3D platformer fare with some ocassional different bits of gameplay (they even tried telltale style dialogue options in one portion!). Sadly there's not a whole lot of archived footage of it, and what there is amounts to home recordings of awful quality. I was always really sad that they never made it into an actual proper game to play at home (our own videogame industry has not gotten too far yet), but the art direction and design displayed in Kito Pizzas was truly, extremely 2000s latinamerican cheese and I miss it so much.
There's one thing that always unnerved me about Hugo: He's constantly looking at you, the player.
He's watching. He's always... watching...
He still is 🥲
4th Wall aka YOU're the Troll 😛 Det var så lidt. ♥ fra lille Dannevang...(sigh)
I’m a Dane. I was a Young teen During the ninetees . I watched him on eleva2eren (a pun on elevator and 2’nd. The network was Called tv2) great memories. Thanks Kim ❤️
I had absolutely no idea that Hugo was a thing anywhere else.
I had Oswald as a PD game on my Amiga, quite a fun little game, pity I didn't know the language as it gave the message "SLUT" on game over, which amused adolescent me!
I remember that too! Used to play it just to see the end screen and crack up laughing!
It's certainly funny, and it's also the Danish word for "Over."
"End" 👍🏻@@annominous826
The original Danish name, skærmtrolden Hugo is probably a pun! Skærmtrolden basically sounds like charmetrolden (charm troll), which is an expression for someone who is extremely charming in a quote way in the Nordic languages. Often used when describing children or pets. Roughly translated it would be the super charming (screen troll) Hugo.
Agreed! I think I also heard somewhere that “skærmtrold” used to refer to someone who was always glued to their TV screen (though, I’m pretty sure it’s rarely if ever used in that sense today), so I think that’s part of the pun, too!
My only prior exposure to Hugo was Retro Pals being dismayed every single time he'd pop up on a PS1 retrospective, and learning the games were designed for a phone call-in game make a good bit of sense. Thanks for the history of this series!
Hugo was HUGE in my region, and I was a huge fan as a kid. The holy trinity of mascots for me was Rayman, Sonic and Hugo (yeah screw Mario).
And here's an unpopular opinion: Some of his later 3D "traditional" games were pretty good as well, like The Evil Mirror and the kart racer "Buckazoom Race" which was offroad focused.
Hi Kim, thanks for this awesome stroll down memory lane. I have very fond memories about Oswald & Hugo from TV here in Denmark. I knew Hugo was huge abroad, but not this huge. I did eventually manage to get my grubby mits on a C64 cassette edition of SuperOswald and later on various Hugo games on the glorius Amiga. A funny thing about the original Hugo (in the mines) was that it was a pretty game, but it had no replay value as the map you explored wasn't randomized on subsequent game loads. But very fun times overall :D
Given its success in the past, I find it pretty odd there has been no Hugo releases in the 2020s
Man, Hugo was HUGE in Turkey: A tv show, its own magazine, coloring books, toys... Heck, I even went to a live Hugo stage play back in the day. It was basically the tv show's (Turkish version's) presenter "against" the evil witch from Hugo (a.k.a. a random, probably underpaid lady in a costume). Hugo himself was projected to a huge screen on the background.
At a certain point, they even made the audience "play" various Hugo games, which essentially meant a bunch of kids screaming "RIGHT", "LEFT", "JUMP" on top of their lungs and Hugo on the screen following suit. It was a lot of fun, I remember absolutely loving it.
I even managed to get my picture taken with the presenter, mr. Tolga after the show! Too bad a kid vomited on his shirt literally a minute later, so they had to finish the picture taking part of the show early. 😂
Seriously, you have no idea how happy this made me. Thank you so much.
Also: Isn't Hugo pretty much the precursor to Subway Surfers? I always found most of the Hugo games extremely similar to it 😄
Hugo was in Finland, too. While my family were staying at a Ski Resort cottage in Lapland and watching Hugo, I was totally caught off guard when my neighbor happened to be on the show. He won a Super Nintendo (people almost never won, I remember). The input latency must've been horrible. The witch antagonist was much like the one in Battletoads. Also, I remember thinking the hostess was very cute, even though I was still a few years from starting elementary school.
Here in Finland we also had Game Over where a hand puppet host Vito let people play 3DO games on a phone. Often it was just some minigolf games. They tried also Super Nintendo games with phone controls but it was horrible. I remember seeing one kid trying to play Donkey Kong Country with that horrible lag and phone controls. 😅
Hugo was not big here on Brazil, but was relativelly well know. I remember seeing children playing it on telephone on TV shows for some time. By the time we already was playing SNES games, we cleary saw that Hugo game was simple, but seing these graphics on TV was a bit impressive. Hugo indeed have his place in our 90s game memory. I did not know all the hisory behind it, thanks again for another greate Documentary about this piece of game history, your videos are always informative (and fun too, I like it).
Thanks for shouting out Sean Season. He is incredibly underrated and his content is amazing
I’m a Dane, I was a kid during the late 90’s-early 2000’s. I was a Big Hugo-fan, having multiple of his games on PC and Playstation. He was everywhere back then with multiple merchandise as well.
A big part of why many people lost on the TV-show was because the phone-system meant there would be a small delay between inputs. That was often why you could hear players press the buttons rapidly. Thanks for the nostalgia-trip, Kim ❤
In Finland we had Hugo and it was huge. After Hugo, we had a show called Game Over, a show hosted by a horrible looking handpuppet called Vito. the show used 3DO console as it's base and suffered many malfunctions during it's run and left many kids calling in disappointed after waiting an hour to get through to the actual broadcast.
I'm from Vietnam. Watching people try their luck on TV, I always thought that I could easily perform better than most of them, having no concept of input lag. Although even kid me knew the final luck base segment at the end of a run was pretty much rigged. This was a huge part of my childhood, thank you for covering it.
I'm Canadian, and I've never seen or heard of Hugo until emulation became a thing. He's a very difficult character to understand without context, so thank you for this.
I just assumed he was some foreign cartoon character and his games were all just licensed shovelware.
I'm from Sweden, and I never played those games, but I remember seeing them om TV shows were kids made the call to play them. And seeing footage of some of these games again made tears flowing from my eyes like two waterfalls! Considering how many game characters from the late 1980's and early 90's getting a comeback in one form or another, I think it's about frickin' time Hugo came out of retirement!
Awesome Vid!
Thank You very much for Your Work! Greetings from Germany
Here in Poland, Hugo was probably the biggest kids' franchise from 2000 to around 2003. He was everywhere, to the point they got cocky and started making jabs at other family-friendly franchises (like Pokemon).
True, although it's worth mentioning that it ran much longer: between 2000 and 2009.
There's an interesting piece on YT made by (seemingly inactive now) Retrostrzał about Polish version of Hugo, which is basically an hour long interview with almost all the actors/TV presenters and voice actors involved throughout the years.
Unfortunately it doesn't have English captions so it's of no value for Kim whatsoever.
I think Poland used to have some exclusive comic books with Hugo
@@milczyciel If it's on youtube AI should be able to do a Polish to English translation
One thing Hugo games are known for are the funny death animations and voices. Something very similar to that are the Die O Ramas in Crash Tag Team Racing.
As a dane born in the 80's this bring's back memories. Remember playing Oswald on my amiga. I remember every friday watching Eleva2ren with my familie. Think that was pretty normal at that time and Kim if you watch this guldkorn expressen is another danish game for the amiga. Its a hidden gem. Forgot to say thank you for all the great content.
Ah this was my childhood 😃. Hugo the Troll was part of the best computer games to play, and I loved watching on TV when people called-in to play....and sometimes a little mock the kids who I thought playing bad (later realised a lot of it could be caused due to poor tele-connection and lagg).
And then over the years playing home console ports on PS1, PS2 and PC. Heck I own some Hugo figures, his plane radio controlled with cord and a plush figure.🧸
Sad how the franchise went south and now we only see him in some poor in-game-purchase games 🃏 and darn casino games 🎰 🙁
20:41 oh man, I owned half of these games in the early 2000s, for me they served as an introduction to arcade gaming world. Yeah, we did have a TV show in Russia back in the 90s, but I never called there or anything (our family was so poor we couldn't afford a phone in the house), but its catchphrase stuck. Но игра продолжается, позвоните Кузе!
I remember I watched Hugo's phone game courses during one of a german kid TV channel called "Super RTL". It was a great experience for me to watch the caller try to get through one of the obstacle courses. 🙂
Although I didn't see a similar phone game in any hungarian TV shows, it's good to see there are game console and PC ports of those mini games.
Funny how we had the exact same experience. Also from Hungary, also saw Hugo on Super RTL. I was mesmerized by the phone game back then :) Didn't think any other Hungarian kid knew about Hugo, lol.
Being American, I find it fascinating when I discover an entire global media phenomenon that reached dozens of countries and stayed popular for over a decade but had absolutely no impact in the United States whatsoever.
Like Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies.
Reminds me of that stupid mr blobby thing. Had no idea what it was but it's huge in England.
It's rare that people bother invading through your Iron Curtain to tell you about it, considering they quick get told that the entire world is pathetic, for constantly talking about USA and American culture.
You know, a nation that doesn't understand that only 340 million have that passport and 700 million DON'T, they're just ACTUAL Americans. That's why they know Latin languages like doctors and lawyers, NATIVELY. That is the language that spreads all this "Western culture", English is just like the common baby talk version of it.
The curio about global culture like Spanish conquistadors and Japanese ninja, is the way how USA always takes that stuff from Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone and rebrands them with their in-house creators like Tarantino and Lucas. Then goes around telling everyone that Batman or Master Yoda is an "american" invention, because you BAN the Fu-Manchu it's actually based on as "racist".
Eurovision Song Contest is something to check out. WWTBAM was big in the US once but you may not be aware it's essentially the McDonald's of Game Shows, it's been everywhere and still running in a ton of countries (Jeopardy is not popular outside North America).
@@poppers7317 I loved They Call Me Trinity; I had no idea there were so many though and not all of them were spaghetti westerns
As a french, the game is pretty notorious here also. Everyone from the time remember the interactive TV show, mostly thanks to the attractive show host, ahah. It was called "Hugo Delire" (something you can translate to "Frenzy Hugo"). But to my knowledge we didn't have very much besides the games (no animated show, etc).
'Hugo Delire de 1993 - Episode 1' is on youtube.
th-cam.com/video/KffKFKcF60w/w-d-xo.html
In Turkey, one of the children that remotely connected to the game swore to Hugo when he couldn't make a jump or something like that. While that moment is claimed to have been witnessed by many people, the show presenter denied that this ever happened. Since there is no record of that particular program, it is still not certain if it is an urban legend, Mandela effect or it actually happened.
Finally, someone has delved into the history of Hugo in a high-quality documentary style, and who better than the incredible Kim Justice! I was a kid in Germany in the 90s and loved watching the show on TV. Just a few years ago, my sister and I played through one of the Hugo games on PS1 for nostalgia's sake. Thank you!
One of the most weird things about Hugo is how good the soundtrack for Hugo 2 PS1 is. It is WAY better than the game itself and i would go as far as saying it is one of the best game soundtracks ever. I dont know how that happened, but i know that it did.
Interesting vid Kim. And im immediately reminded, as a brit, having only seen Hugo swinging from a noose for a few seconds in "Budbrain Megademo 2" and having no context whatsoever until around a decade later.
At least two of the guys from BudBrain worked at ITE (who made the Hugo games). One was my boss there at one point. Many who worked there became tired of Hugo and just wanted him to die ;)
@@BarrySlisk Hahah! Not surprised at all! I once hid an easter egg in a cd-rom project I worked on where you could blow the product up if you clicked on the right areas of the screen at the right time.
I recall TG4, the one Irish Language channel I am aware of, still doing Hugo stuff till I was around 12 or 13, which would've been around 05 or 06. Thought it was native due to the Irish Language itself being there and it being a major part of TG4's branding even a bit after they stopped using him on their programming.
My memory of Hugo is framed primarily by the 2000s PC game releases from Hugo Jungle Island onward, whether it be the early 2000s Jungle Island minigame collections released or some of the more standalone titles that came out at the time, such as Hugo: The Magic Oak and especially Hugo: The Magic Journey. These experiences were primarily in Czech, and trying to figure out whether or not Hugo appeared on Czech TV gave me nothing, with 'Hugo - Dobrodružství v džungli' being utterly dominated by results for the video game releases instead (so unless something missing, Hugo was just a game franchise in Czechia); meanwhile, in my native Serbia, just as he had appeared on Croatian TV, he appeared on Serbian TV during his Jungle Island incarnation, with 'Hugo: Ostrvo džungle'.
Hugo's appearance in Serbia would actually inspire Belgrade-based studio Fun Factory (otherwise known as Janus Interactive, which had previously contributed on TV quiz shows 'Kešolovac' and 'Lova za slova') create its own take on the format, first developing Secret Agent Izzy (Tajni agent Izzy) and then Bunga Banga Re, existing in some form on Serbian airwaves up to 2009. In 2009, Fun Factory helped launch several SMS prize giveaway programs on Serbian TV, but one of the leads behind Fun Factory, Predrag 'Peđa' Bećirić, ended up in conflict as a result of his attempts to prove the games weren't simply games of chance (with the State Lottery of Serbia believing otherwise, thus making them fall under their jurisdiction). Attempting to prove that they were in fact not games of chance, and also discovering that, in his eyes, the State Lottery didn't communicate the rules of the SMS prize giveaways properly (thus leaving players in a disadvantage), Bećirić organized a group and, utilizing a simple method, partook in the giveaways, winning like 5 apartments and 125 cars, though hiring folks to accept the prizes in their stead. For this, Bećirić was arrested in March 2010, and later he and 17 co-conspirators were sentenced to four and a half years in prison in 2016, though that verdict was later revoked in 2017. Today, Bećirić seems to be working for an unrelated Turkish-run Janus Interactive which currently develops a World War 2-themed crypto/NFT play-to-earn F2P mobile game.
I still remember years ago when a 3D comeback movie for Hugo was announced, but I don't think anything came of that.
I think Hugo was helped in Germany by its hot young hosts, actresses like Judith Hildebrandt, Sonja Zietlow or Minh-Khai Phan-Thi helped the show massively. I remember one episode of Sonja declaring before the episode started she was wearing a mini skirt, and the camera trying to catch a peak for the whole runtime of the show. The 90s were a different time
The last Hugo game for a console was Hugos Spielewerkstatt, released in 2009(!) for the PS2, 12 years after the end of the Hugo Show. But then we also had 23 years of Moorhuhn games. Now that would be a topic, that game was called a danger to german work productivity because everyone was hunting Moorhühner.
Jesus Christ, how many licences got slapped on those Crazy Castles games? I count Micky Mouse, Roger Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, Garfield, Real Ghostbusters, Woody Woodpecker and now Hugo.
I met Hugo the troll on Magic Kids TV Argentinian channel in 1997 ❤
I am a Danish game developer who as a child was allowed to stay up a little extra so that I could see Hugo being played on TV. So quite fun watching your video here. It was also quite funny to hear you try to pronounce our Æ. It is not quite easy. ;)
my only experience of hugo was on a gameboy multicart with hugo 2, I remember really liking the snowboarding game with the faux FPS encounters with the snowmen.
Thank you for covering this danish classic. I watched Oswald, Super Oswald and Hugo in Eleva2ren, and I later played the Amiga and PC releases of those games.
Unfortunately, the PC release of the original Hugo mine-navigation game is extremely difficult to come by. Subsequent releases can be found online, but typically in the German dubbed versions :(
I am a Dane from the early 90's. My parents taped the Hugo segments from Eleva2ren for me, because I was obsessed with Hugo.
I watched it, I had it on as background noise, I fell asleep to it, I wore that tape down until some segments looked like abstract video-art.
Funny how it is exactly how people watch let's plays now, just way back before you even could upload videos to the internet.
Thanks for the nostalgia fix.
I’m a little too young to have watched Hugo on TV, but I’ve played the games from the TV show plenty of times, as they got PC ports sometime in the 2000s, and they were dirt-cheap here in Denmark! The family PC wasn’t too up-to-date, so Hugo was one of the only things it played xD Those games and the Volcano Island series (which consisted of two minigame compilations released in the late 90s, featuring a few games from the TV show, as well as some that were more tailored for PC) made me a bit of a Hugo addict, and I played both the platformers and the Agent Hugo series religiously 😅 I seem to remember RoboRumble, the second Agent Hugo game, being a pretty fun little rail shooter, and because I was so into Hugo, I actually entered a contest to win the third Agent Hugo game, Lemoon Twist! That game was kinda experimental, if memory serves? It gave Hugo a bunch of gadgets to use, and was also kind of a collectathon? I didn’t get too far as a kid - don’t think my baby brain could figure it out xD Hearing about Hugo’s origins was wild! I really enjoyed this look back at the series ✨
Thanks Kim! It has been bothering me for YEARS what the name of the football game they played on T.I.G.S. on CITV was. Crazy Cartoon Soccer! I can see though why it is not as well remembered now - a quick google of the stereotypical characters you used to control have not aged well!
Swede here who fondly remembers Hugo, how dull the reflexes of everyone playing seemed to be (I did not know...) and who is hoenst to god baffled that it was so popular even outside of Europe. I feel like I haven't really seen that popularity, seen references to Hugo or deep dives until this one (except for one Danish guy whose videos I follow). Seeing just how massive they were and realizing it made so much money it more or less spawned the Danish videogame industry, I have to confess. I am very impressed, and very eager to give Hugo his true flower and props. To think you were this big all along...
Also liked the segment talking about how this was one of the first big "online" attempts with video games, or a way that really turned games into something so mainstream it could become a "game-show". Never really thought about these games as pushing any kind of technological development, and I was clearly in the wrong there.
I'm German and personally I never saw Hugo on TV, he was entirely a videogame character to me. A friend in elementary school had a few Hugo games for his PC that we played a bunch.
I do remember this on kids tv was it at the weekends and summer holidays
In my country argentina being mad at those kids failing games so easy on tv was the equivalent to insulting football players as adults
As someone who grew up in argentina seeing this hugo character as a kid ii enjoyed it a lot even if i was watching people playing it, there was also another 'TV Game' like Kito Pizza which was all in 3D around my country, it feels good to have a comprehinsible history about hugo in general, i never knew about OsWALD before but i am glad to learn about his existence now.
Fantastic informative video!
Thanks for the shoutout - I always keep an eye out for the originals of these to see if we could ever preserve the TV versions of these through the likes of MAME or similar.
For what it's worth, I was always more a Hugo fan than Joe Razz - as a bit of a laserdisc nerd, I tend to prefer those games with a meaningful interactive layer as opposed to glorified scene selects and QTEs.
A quick mention as someone just a little older than Kim - the original Motormouth interactive game of choice, if you can believe it, was Weird Dreams on the Amiga - I can't think of anything harder to handle with lag etc, even if it is a hair simpler than the regular version.
Excuse me, WHAT is Oswald calling me at 4:35? 😆
That was a good one. In 1998 i played this on live tv and got the basic prize: sticker, shirt and bag for completing the swimming game. By that time we had Hugo on one channel and MTV had the tech for a show with their own characters, Throut & Neck. While Hugo was for kids and the host was a cute lady, on the mtv side the show had tons of cursing (it was at 5 pm) and the host was João Gordo, vocalist of the punk rock band Ratos de Porão. You can find him today in the channel Panelaço, the story of his life is quite awesome.
A few months after i played it someone bought the Hugo game for the Playstation and it really was the same but with a lot better gameplay. On tv i always tought how annoying it was that the host was all the time screaming the next command we should press. After i noticed the tv had a 5 seconds delay i tried to listen but still lost one life.
I'm from Malaysia. Back in the early 2000s, Hugo used to be big that we had our version of a TV game show. I also used to have a PS1 game of it.
I've always been curious about this story, since Hugo had many games with such a humble beginning.
Great sleuthing. 😻
I used to play Hugo Classic #1, Hugo: The Bewitched Rollercoaster and Hugo: The Magic Journey when I was a kid. According to Kim Frederiksen (Psycho), Crionics was annoyed that Budbrain beat them because they came in second place in the Amiga Conference 1990 Amiga Demonstration Competition after Budbrain Megademo, and they were used to winning, so they decided to mock Budbrain. One of the main people working at Crionics was a graphics artist named Madonna Freak. Frederiksen and Rene Bidstrup (Diablo) decided to do Budbrain Megademo II's storyline where Nikki Finn (Madonna's character in Who's That Girl) is stabbed to death in a parody of Psycho as a jab at Crionics. They were also becoming fed up with Hugo the Troll and feeling jealous that they were not working for SilverRock Productions (later Interactive Television Entertainment) at the time. They decided to 'take the p**s' by revealing Hugo as Nikki's/Madonna's killer, who is sentenced to death by hanging as the Twin Peaks theme song plays, but at the same time utilise it to show off their work. Bidstrup drew Hugo from scratch himself instead of stealing graphics from the game show. Because of this, the two got to work for ITE, working on the MS-DOS version of the video game. Frederiksen does not like Budbrain Megademo II because unlike the original Budbrain Megademo that was made in a year, this was made in three months and not as well thought through. The demonstration also received criticism for having more text than animation. Budbrain was disliked by the elite demosceners because of their silly style that could be interpreted as mocking the scene, and they thought that they got away with the Crionics jab too easy and did not show that they could do six more sprites than 'the other guy'. Budbrain decided to go for a more creative approach, and felt that the demonstration was to show how good the programmer was. It had nothing to do with the graphics artist, music, scripting, concept or continuity, it was really a showcase of the programmer's work. They took the programmer down to the level of the graphics artist and the music and lifted everything to the same level, so they had a lot of detractors. Flash Production made Budbrain Megademo III, which Frederiksen considers 'really terrible' and 'made super-bad on purpose', though he appreciates the work put into it. Despite their backlash, Budbrain also had their fans. Frederiksen received a lot of mail (with disks inside) from all over the world outside his house after staying at his parents' for three weeks during the summer. Due to not making money from their work and fame, Frederiksen could not afford to write back to the fans as it would have cost him a fortune, much to their anger, which kind of killed his interest in training with video games and demonstrations.
Sources: demozoo.org/productions/2020/
demozoo.org/productions/104336/
th-cam.com/video/AjpLXAsypl4/w-d-xo.html
www.dtkdesign.co.uk/interview-with-kim-frederiksen-aka-psycho-from-budbrain/ (47:40-51:07, 51:08-52:08, 52:09-53:56, 53:57-54:30)
One of the most underated on TH-cam. I patterned my own content after this channel. Always well researched info on this channel.
Hugo was huuuge in Brazil. I tried calling in so much as a child to play the games, but never got through
Sério? Cara, eu juro que não lembro. Em qual canal era isso?
@@SirCaco acho que era na Gazeta. Mas era tipo 1995
@@pedromenchik1961 Aaah, por isso. Eu nasci em 94 kkkkk valeu, eu vou procurar pq eu gosto de ver essas coisas.
I think I remember Wally Winger showing off him being the English dub voice of Hugo in his visual reel; funnily enough, he also voiced Throg in "Throg & Neck" as well.
"Left him due to long working hours". That's a weird reason for breaking up. But I doubt it was the real one.
My friend had Hugo on the Amiga, plus a rudimentary recording setup. We had fun recording our own episodes of the tv-show. One of us would be the host, and the others played increasingly eccentric callers.
I'm sure some if the recordings survive, but they're best left as good memories. Our 15year olds humor would be cringy to listen to now 😅
Thanks for the quality captions. I remember this little guy from cable tv in latin america in the early 2000s, I thought playing in live tv while on a regular house phone was the peak of technology
I was a small boy on Chile about 5 years old when hugo eas show in the public tv channel. This was about 1995. Yu have used some images of the show on the video and It brings a lot of memories...
Greetings from Chile
So cool to see you finally covering the Hugo series.
Growing up in Denmark, I remember catching Hugo on TV many time and my mom would record a lot of the episodes for me.
I would always get annoyed when some boomer would call in and not be to play the game properly xD
Although I have no idea how bad the lag between the phone and the "live" transmission actually was so tha might have played in. Which was likely also why the Hugo games usually gave you a somewhat generous window for error.
It is kinda interesting that the demographic over here who would originally call in was older people compared to the rest of the world were it was usually kids. However, that would also be the case over here later on after Eleva2eren ended it's run.
Hugo really was a national phenomenon though.
In Denmark around Christmas, there will always be a 24-episode long TV Christmas calender and I remember one episode in particular where the protagonist (a Christmas elf living in a archive) accidentally use a magic spell to transfer himself and his girlfriend into the office's new computer and they end up in the labyrinth Hugo game. They even gave him a very well-animated sprite. As a kid I always wanted to play that but I doubt it was actually real gameplay. It did incapsulate how big Hugo was around the time.
You can see the segment here if you fancy: th-cam.com/video/GMt0M7t7wXw/w-d-xo.html (Assumming i hasn't been taken off)
The antagonist "Afskylia/Repulsia/Scylla" always kinda reminded me of the Dark Quen from Battletoads xD
I also don't know what was up with the name Hugo around that time cause one of the biggest animated movies coming out of Denmark through the 90s also carried that name "Jungledyret Hugo / The Jungle Animal Hugo" about this one-of-kind animal that someone tries to kidnap from the jungle and he ends up in the big city "likely Copenhagen" I even remember them also doing a short segment in Eleva2eren where the two Hugos would inetact.
I sadly never got to own a lot of Hugo games as a kid. I believe I had the labyrinth one of diskette at some point but the one I remember the most was that lazy Crazy Castle 2 reskin or the Game Boy. I do believe "Hugo 2" and "Hugo 2½" on Game Boy/Color WAS in fact a proper conversion of the older Amiga games, which I really wish I had gotten instead.
Although while I could be wrong, I do believe both of those games were German exclusives.
Also, very random trivia but I walked past a really old Chinese take-away place some time ago and they had this old ice cream poster on the wall. They didn't actually sell any ice cream so it's likely that it has been on that wall for the last 30 years and they never bothered to remove it, but on that poster there was actually a Super Oswald ice cream. I thought that was interesting. I don't believe Hugo ever got the ice cream treatment but I could be wrong.
I also have to stress just how lazy the names of both Hugo and Oswald's girlfriends' names are. In Denmark Donald Duck is Called Anders And and Daisy called Andersine, so I imagine they applied the same logic. Also, I doubt any girl in Denmark have ever actually carried eithe rof these 3 names xD
Oh my gosh, I used to think Jungledyret Hugo and Skærmtrolden Hugo were related somehow! I had no idea they were on TV together - granted, I’m a little too young to have watched Eleva2ren 😅 But I remember that segment from Pyrus!
And I’m really glad to see I’m not the only one who made the connection with the names 😅 I think they did about the same thing with Hugo and Hugoline’s kids, Rit, Rat, and Rut - pretty sure they’re derived from Huey, Dewey, and Louie’s Danish names (Rip, Rap, and Rup). Though, if that’s the case, I think it’s a little lazy that they just carried over the names as-is in the English translation - the reference is lost entirely xD
Thanks to Hugo us sweds got Rummel och Rabalder, two puppets controlled by strings. They we're also part of this genre, with a game you could play in Lattjo lajban, with your phone.
"Ich fühl mich wie Indiana Jones"
damn, as a kid I thought he was pretty funny. Always watched the show, don't think I ever tried to get on their myself, but my cousin had one of the games on CD-Rom
Hugo was a game show? How many children's game shows were on TV in the 80s and 90s!? Because I'm starting to get a little annoyed at how they all ended before I was old enough to even think about competing on one!
Played a surprising amount of Danish PC games as a kid despite not living there, Hugo being one of my favorites. Guess their games just had a ton of appeal to rest of Europe at the time like their educational games.
I had a pirated danish (I'm not in Denmark) copy of Hugo for PC back in the early 90s. Super fun games. We even had our own show here in Slovenia, but that was back in the day when DTMF phones were still somewhat new.
Truly inspiring that what are genuinely some of the most unappealing character designs I've ever seen broke out of being what most people would consider shovelware to become... more shovelware. AMAZING what Europeans will eat if you put it in front of them.
Oi mate! Don't you do my boy Hugo dirty like that!
I never played Hugo's games, but i do remember i first saw him with that agent Hugo game, and later on, i would see him again with that localisation of that Game Boy game.
Those phone in games pressing keys on the phone or shouting left,right, Jump.
Anyone remember Joe Razz?
I remember Hugo from TV programs where people called in and played with their telephone in Sweden 😅
Thanks Kim
i love videos like this cause they talk about games i never heard of but are iconic in other parts of the world
I remember this being on TV when I was a teenager and owned an Amiga 500. And it always seemed kind of cool, at the time, to think that the computers being used for this game on the TV was also the Amiga. I remember trying out the home version and not thinking too highly of it.
Hugo was part of my childhood, but it was kinda hard to watch because the channel that aired here in Brazil was hard to tune in clearly (aaaaah, the good old days), so when I discovered the PS1 conversions (one of them at least) in 99 or 2000 (don't recall exactly when), and despite being simplistic... It was cheaper than using the phone on the TV days (seriously, phones here in Brazil in the 90's were a luxury that poor families couldn't afford)..
Banger video, as always.
I recall entering a rabiit hole regarding a "Hugo Movie" that's been stuck in Production Hell for a really long time....
0:23 I remember her. That's Judith Hildebrandt from the German Hugo show.
Hugo was also big in Sweden. The first commercial TV channel in the country, that started nationwide broadcasts in the early 1990s (before that there was only state television), TV4, had Hugo in various morning kid's shows throughout the 90s.
Makes sense for Hugo to be big in Sweden; both Denmark & Sweden are Nordic countries.
Well researched. Well presented. Quality job as always Kim. Cheers
The Amiga demo crew Budbrain did an animation of Hugo being hanged in their second demo, it's called the trial and you can see it at 8 minutes into the demo. He is convicted of the murder of Madonna. (Sorry Crionics). I know my Amiga demo history and I NEED to get out more...........Great video Kim!!
2 of the BudBrain guys worked at ITE (who created Hugo)
I remember this ..."game" in brazilian tv channel CNT during late '90s and very early 2000s 😂
Unfortunately Hugo wasn't a big hit here in Brazil like it was in other countries.
Perhaps if the show was aired by a more prestigious TV channel (like TV Globo or SBT) it would have had a more significative impact.
The success of Hugo from such a small country reminds me a lot of the success of Norway's stop-motion masterpiece "The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix" from 1975.* It is well known among stop motion aficionados and sold more tickets in Norway than there are people in Norway! It's somewhat hard to find, especially in NTSC format for those of us in the western hemisphere, but well worth it for fans of the genre. There was actually a 3D game made for it fairly recently too: th-cam.com/video/vspkymea-fM/w-d-xo.htmlsi=qVcerxZl4R1wcWUP
* Here's a trailer for the movie: th-cam.com/video/q5MF6OocKPg/w-d-xo.htmlsi=VBugfgZY54GAn6f4
I was a kid here in Germany in the 90's and I can confirm Hugo was huuuuuge.
Also, I really always wanted to play the PC games and honestly, I had lots of fun for a long time :)
Sure, coming back now as adult make me think these are super simple games but it is fun for younger kids :)
I remember Hugo being a pretty popular segment here in Argentina in the mid to late 90's, if I'm not wrong it had its own show in cable TV. I never got to play because I knew that calls from my province either weren't elegible for the game or just never got through, can't remember which one exactly, back then I had not idea of what input lag was but retrospectively it makes a lot of sense that trying to play a game over a telephone from a thousand kilometers away was just not feasible. Now I'm kinda curious about tracking down the games and trying them on an emulator.
BTW watching this much nicer gameplay footage made me realize of just how low the color depth of these games was, the prerendered 3D elements really show the limitations of the Amiga pallete, but back in the day CRTs did a great job of hiding those imperfections.
Turkish/German ex-kid here: totally LOVED hugo, always wanted to call there - not allowed. Never got the games either hahaha... But god damn, Hugo is just burned into my memory. I looked up Hugo and his whereabouts a few months ago and was SHOCKED how long they made games with that character. But damn, due to russian neighbours and being from turkey, i KNEW that he was bigger than "Kabel 1" , like he was everywhere.
And not gonna lie, some of those mini-games look actually still fun. (Like how i would now look at WarioWare or a smartphone game). I wonder if you could salvage Hugo in some sort of adventure-revival. Its like Moorhuhn (aka Crazy Chicken?), where i saw some sort of redemption with Moorhuhn Kart or that Jump and Run game... But yeah, it would need some skilled studio - maybe Playtonic implementing him as a secret character in a Yooka Laylee game? idk. But yeah, what a trip.
Being Canadian I've no memories of Hugo but this is a good start. Thanks Kim.
❤HUGO was a cult phenomenon of his time,
rudimentary ideas, but well executed. NOSTALGIC ❤
Wow. Nostalgia. Yeah, Hugo was on TV shows when I was a kid where viewers would phone in and control the character through key presses. I always wondered what that game was as I never saw it on consoles.
As much early childhood nostalgia I have for Hugo and "Æh, hvor skal vi hen du" (Pretty much a danish translation of Bugs Bunnys What's up, doc"), and as proud I am as a Dane of this groundbreaking piece of entertainment technology, I feel it's a plague, with all the slot games, and clearly cynical cash grab video games. Dare I say it, he's pretty much the 90's Danish equivalent to Crazy Frog, even if that is clearly much worse
Thanks for another great video Kim! I never heard of this one.
I had no idea Hugo was a big deal. Just remember playing some of the ancient CD-rom games of my fathers on his old computer. I remember having a lot of fun with them.
In Indonesia we... never encountered him on TV. I even thought he is a bootleg character or something since he appeared often among the pirated PS1 games. Didn't know he was this big of an influence!
12:33 Over 30 years and Scylla still scares me a bit. I swear I used to see that face in the dark.
Black Diamond Fever was my favorite ps1 game when i was a child, i was a huge hugo fan of course, saludos desde Argentina.
It was very popular here in France, indeed ! Great video, Kim !