It was the most beautiful ritual in existence.
I will forever remember how my sister and I would practically jump out of my dad's Volkswagen Gol as it was still moving, easing to a halt as he killed off the engine, how we climbed the stairs to our home and deposited our bags on the floor, rushing to the TV so we could catch half an episode of Pokemon (because the school didn't let up early enough for us to see the whole thing). Then we would storm to the kitchen, commandeer the table and crowd it with our books and folders, pencils at the ready and minds sharp with determination as mom handed us steaming cups of heavenly chocolate milk to combat the effects of an Austral Winter whose winds roared overhead and froze us through as the lights outside our high window dimmed, giving the dead tree on the neighboring lot an orange glow and the aspect of a fiendish claw dead-set on reaching for a sky denied to it.
For a while the only sounds present on our apartment was the endless, almost mechanical scrapping of pencils across regulation sheets of paper, the occasional click of a tongue as a problem turned out to be trickier than "advertised", the distant humming of the bedroom TV as my dad engrossed himself on the latest sports news, and my mom's tired --yet extremely kind and caring-- steps as she readied the home for yet another day of normalcy, oiling the individual parts of the machine that was our family to perfection with the earned mastery of the craft that years of being a devoted mother and an excellent homemaker had given her, as she reached the peak of a career that didn't pay on money (and was so often thankless), but also delivered riches untold and that was much more fulfilling than any other job or position on Earth. In a way, she was our very own, personal volunteer firefighter, always ready to fight a problem as the flames of existence consumed us.
I have always loved just how eager to get going this little fella was.
Do not be fooled, though! That feverish marathon of early homework wasn't a sign of us being super devoted students who were ready to take on the whole education system, climbing the mountain of success until we could claim its peak for ourselves and get a commanding view of the world below... no, it was a necessary sacrifice, because we needed to be free from the chains of normal life and the obligations of school as soon as possible. Our next two hours had been already been booked and couldn't be swapped... as soon as 18:30 rolled around, the pencils stopped moving, the folders were closed shut, and all the mathematical problems in the world were duly forgotten.
It was time to watch A Jugar Con Hugo.
A Jugar Con Hugo was the most mind-blowing thing I had ever seen, and it remains just as captivating as ever, despite all the years that have passed since I watched it first. It was a show that effectively produced a small miracle in front of my young, impressionable eyes: it performed the ultimately sorcery of making it so I was not only watching a live TV show in which videogames were shown, but I was also watching people playing them... and they were doing it from the comfort of their own homes! That absolutely messed with me as a kid, and immediately fired up all the curiosity cylinders in my brain until it went into overdrive (close to a complete meltdown, really -- beautiful wonders of being six-years-old). I simply wanted to know how that worked, but no amount of rapid-fire questions (mostly directed at my parents and teachers) could really solve that one for me. And that fired me up even more.
What a typical level looked like. The fact that I could only grab screenshots of such low quality only enhances and captures the original mood the whole thing had.
The game part of the show couldn't have been simpler, but that's also what made it so appealing and the effect so ever-lasting (as evidenced by the fact that it went on for nine seasons and more than 6000 episodes!): you just guided our little friend through some very simple mazes and then you'd confront the evil witch Scylla, taking the fight to her lair (which was little more than a game of chance with three possible, randomly-generated outcomes that the player had no say in). What made it so interesting to watch, however, was the fact that the game was controlled entirely through people's landlines, using the keypad to steer the character and select options and the mouthpiece to both communicate with the host (and Hugo himself) and to get instructions. Oh, poor Gaby (our lovely host) always tried to remind viewers to listen to the phone and not the TV while playing, because the feedback was slower when it made it to the screen and that cost crucial seconds that always resulted in failure, but kids rarely ever listened, and that made it all the funnier to watch... you knew how simple the game looked and just had to watch in agony as some dumb kid from a town you had never even heard of and experiencing an entirely different weather and temperature just impaled poor Hugo on a tree branch because he was listening to the TV instead of the phone, but you also rooted hard for those kids because they were lucky enough to get on the show, to chat a bit with the woman that had been a fixture on our lives for nine whole years, to send their greetings to friends and family members, and ultimately to complain about school and to declare why math was the worst subject ever known to man. There was something quite precious about that... and that wild energy, once interrupted, could never be resumed (and we tried with a sort of spiritual successor to the show called "Kito Pizzas", which essentially did the same thing, but could never really capture the same magic again).
One eternal argument in my home was the fact that dad would never let us call the show, not because it was expensive (and it truly was!), but because we had a rotary telephone and he insisted --quite accurately-- that it would have been impossible to play the game like that... he was right, of course, but I could never stop giggling whenever I imagined what kind of s***show that would have been, listening to Gaby's instructions through the line whilst she (and her whole audience) could hear the slow, deliberate turning of the dial as it painstakingly made its way to the game keys ("8", "4", "6", "2") and back, probably too shocked or second-hand embarrassed to say anything about it. I wish we would have tried just to see the end result of that madness, but it'd have been so utterly depressing as to make me almost glad that we never got the chance to even call the show, let alone get picked for it.
There's really not a lot to discuss as far as the core gameplay went: the formula rarely --if ever-- changed, and the mazes were essentially the same thing but with different backgrounds, enemies and hazards (all theme-appropiate). However, the prizes is where things got really interesting.
Making it to Scylla took skill, but actually beating her was strictly a matter of dumb luck.
Most kids playing the game would never make it far enough to take home a huge prize, but there were several excellent mid-tier goodies to be earned: A decent enough score would not only net you your very own copy of the game, but you'd also get to choose which of its many installments you wanted to take home with you. A really good score would get a bicycle (a remarkable prize, given that most families couldn't really afford them at the time) and being the absolute winner of the whole thing would take your and your family right to Orlando, Florida. It was the first time I had ever heard of such an award, and it felt absolutely unreal at a time when most kids would only know about the United States through movies and cartoons and were resigned to the fact that they were never going to visit that country during their childhood (or maybe ever). And maybe because so much was at stake, we paid special attention to the finals and never missed a single installment of those hard-fought battles, as the kids visibly swore under their breaths and cursed every mistake while turning their own tongues into living chew toys as concentration took hold and every non-vital function of their bodies and minds were shut down to achieve complete concentration... and I know that it sounds super overdramatic, but the finals were in-person, right on the studio, so you could actually see those kids as their mouths hung open, their fingers twitched and sweat dripped from their frowned features. It was like watching Game 7 of the World Series or the final game of the World Cup, but in some studio somewhere in the heart of Buenos Aires and only visible to those who happened to own a cable package and were following the show. It was our little secret; a secret that we shared with millions of other kids from the high mountains of the Peru to the icy wonderlands of Tierra del Fuego.
As always, my most enduring memories with this show are the ones that happened outside of the screen... like the time my dad found my seven-year-old self waving at the TV at the end of an episode, just as Gaby was bidding farewell to all her viewers. He just wouldn't let that go and would always bring it up at the most annoying of times just to be a pest. His teasing was relentless, but it was actually really funny just how much he was enjoying himself there. There were also a myriad of conversations among my classmates about how they had finally gotten permission to call to the show and were put on hold for a really long while, until their parents finally had enough of blowing up the phone bill and forced them to hang up. There was always someone who would brag about "almost getting on the show", but never actually making it due to a "bad connection" or "because they slotted someone else when it was their turn to shine". Most of that was classic made-up, reccess-y BS, I'm sure, but it was also an integral part of the experience. A nineties show wasn't really a nineties show if it didn't transcend its medium and became a conversational topic that would take weeks (or, in this case, years) to exhaust. That's just how we rolled after coming down from the neon pink wonders of the 80s and into the slime years of our decade.
I was very surprised to learn that the show had been broadcast last a few days after my fifteenth birthday (I had always assumed that it had ended years before that), but I was even more surprised to see that they had gone out in style by having a last "farewell" segment in which both Gaby and whoever was voicing Hugo were setting half the country on fire with comments about how the evil witch had finally got them out of the way... by getting a job on the government. It was a wild take to hear --and I imagine that they either didn't tell anyone that they were gonna drop that bomb or the studio didn't care as it was being liquidated around them--. They didn't stop there, either.
"Yipieeeeee!".
As the conversation picked up, and they chose to largely forego a last, sentimental send-off (but they still paid due homage to all the great years we shared), they stayed on their flamethrower-powered rampage by continuing to show hostility towards the people leading the country (or failing to) at the moment, from the low-level civil servants whose offices were just around the block to the president himself. I watched this rant decades after it had happened, with the enormous benefit of understanding what was going on at the time, and it was just as shocking as I'm sure it must have been at the time, but they kept it classy by making references to the show itself as if it was a big joke... a joke that was costing dozens --if not hundreds-- of jobs, but one that still needed to be toned down in order to be presented to the target audience in a somewhat digestible manner. And honestly? Reducing such a social and economic disaster to the work of the main antagonist of the show/game taking control of the country as a way to finally get rid of our heroes was absolutely brilliant. An almost chess move, really.
And the worst part is that I can actually see Scylla finally deciding to let go of the kidnapping schemes and random plots to capture Hugo and his family and instead pursuing a political career with the objective of outlawing them and making them public enemies, something that I think a lot of franchises would benefit enormously from trying out (still waiting for the scenario imagined by Ross Scott in which Robotnik decides to use his enormous wealth to lobby the government and label Sonic as an eco-terrorist who consistently breaks into his private property and destroys his machinery).
An article about this show had been on my mind since the very beginning of my membership on this site, but it was incredibly hard to pull off both due to my fading memories and YouTube's downright hostile copyright bots and diminished searching capabilities, all of which made it almost impossible to get my hands on videos and footage from the show to take as refreshers that would allow me to write a more complete piece... and the fact that I had to resort to watching a dusty VHS tape on its last legs to get a last feeling from a show I had first watched in the First Grade both inspires and depresses me.
I apologize for the aimlessness of it all, but Memory Lane is quite the bumpy road.
Thanks for reading!
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I’m really glad you lived through such wonderful experiences with A Jugar Con Hugo. While it’s a shame you couldn’t participate because of the rotary phone, I’d be scared shitless if I were in your shoes. It’s why I never asked my parents to call these shows, because I knew I’d be scared to death if I heard my voice on tv
!!!
