Hugo — two unrelated series

Two completely unrelated series share the name Hugo, and this catalogue holds both. The first came from a one-man studio: in 1990 David P. Gray released Hugo's House of Horrors as shareware, a DOS adventure where you type commands — "open door", "look window" — and where nearly every careless step kills you. Hugo searches a haunted house for his kidnapped Penelope. The sequel Hugo II, Whodunit? flips the roles: you play Penelope and swap ghosts for a murder mystery at an English estate, while Hugo 3 strands the couple in a jungle after a plane crash, hunting for an antidote.

The other Hugo is a Danish television troll. Studio ITE built him in 1990 as a game that viewers controlled live on air with their phone keypads: a mine cart, a little plane, a rope over a gorge. The format was sold to dozens of countries, and for a while the troll was a bigger household name than most game characters of the era.

From live TV to home releases

The broadcast minigames later reached home machines: Hugo 2 collects the classic disciplines of rescuing the troll family from the witch, The Quest for the Sunstones is a proper platformer, and Agent Hugo from 2005 turns the troll into a 3D secret agent. You can tell the two branches apart at a glance: Gray's games are static EGA screens with a text parser, the troll games are colourful reflex tests against the clock.

Playability splits just as cleanly: Gray's adventures launch straight in your browser, no installing, no downloads. The troll branch is here as game profiles — overviews, screenshots and facts for every entry.