‘Yo! Noid’: Nintendo’s Most Playable Domino’s Commercial
Hey, Skitchers. This week, I didn’t play an old game based on a TV show or watch a movie so bad I still think it might have been a dream. No, I just played this game called Balatro — a roguelike deckbuilding game that’s like Slay the Spire meets Seven Card Stud. If the preceding sentence sounded like some sort of free-form word association exercise to you, let me put it another way: I fucked off a lot playing a card game on the computer.
I love deckbuilding games. In the last few years alone, I’ve enjoyed the aforementioned Slay the Spire, as well as Marvel Snap, SteamWorld: Quest, Monster Train, and now Balatro, among others. The idea is simple: collect cards to add to an ongoing deck, which is used to take on different enemies and/or challenges, based on the individual rules of said game. The pairing of strategic battles with play-at-your-own-pace turns makes these games the perfect combination of engaging yet still relaxing enough at the end of a long day spent reading about shitty old Atari Jaguar games.
I still have roughly 200 more hours of Balatro, but inevitably I’m already wondering what might scratch my deckbuilding itch after this. This made me start thinking of other games from the genre, or other genres that might incorporate some deckbuilding elements.
I’m not the biggest Pokémon guy, for example, but if I picture those buggers in my pocket as a handful of cards in a deck, suddenly it all starts sounding pretty fun to me, and I’m wondering which game I should circle back and check out.
It occurred to me that one of the weird games that I’ve been meaning to find an excuse to write about has what could be loosely described as a “deckbuilding mechanic.” And brother, I’m about to describe it as such.
The Nintendo Entertainment System’s Yo! Noid, starring the disturbing former Domino’s Pizza mascot, features a ‘deckbuilding mechanic’ in the form of pizza-eating contests held at the end of every other level. You collect power ups and cards during the early parts of the levels, and at the end, you enter the contest. You and your opponent take turns playing one card at a time, with the number on the card representing how many pizzas you’re about to eat at once. The winner of each round adds the difference between cards to their cumulative total, and the first one to reach the goal wins.
If you win, you get some bonus points. If you lose, you have to play the level over. High stakes!
Oh, what’s that? You’ve never fucking heard of the Noid and wanna know all about this bastard? Fine by me.
The Noid was a half-critter/half-career criminal who was featured heavily in Domino’s advertising in the ‘80s, shortly after they introduced their legendary “30 Minutes or Free” delivery promotion. Claymation ads depicted the Noid thwarting customers from receiving their pizzas within the advertised time frame. Here, let them explain it. (Oh, and the Noid is the stuff nightmares are made of, so prepare yourself accordingly.)
So, that’s the Noid’s whole deal. He was sort of like Wile E. Coyote, if The Road Runner made ends meet by delivering pizzas. It was a bold choice to only feature a villain. It’d be like if McDonald’s got rid of Ronald, Grimace, and the gang, and did commercials that featured nothing but The Hamburglar talking shit.
It seems like a strange and misguided decision to invent a villain purely to brag about avoiding him. I think it would’ve been really smart if Pizza Hut answered with a campaign that was like:
“Here at Pizza Hut, we don’t ever have to deal with the Noid. It’s hassle-free over here.
We don’t even know that guy.”
Anyway, like Chester Cheetah and that cool little red circle with the sunglasses that used to sell 7-Up, the Noid was around long enough to get a tie-in video game. These snack pushers got video-game-big, but fell short of Saturday-morning-cartoon big — the planned Saturday morning animated programs The Noids and Yo! It’s the Chester Cheetah Show were both scrapped before production began. Cool Spot’s radical politics ensured that he’d never receive a television offer.
If you’re familiar with the lore and motivations of the Noid, the first thing you’ll notice is that the Noid is the hero of the game. Ooh! Move over Last of Us, we’ve been using morally gray protagonists since at least 1990.
I kid around, but what could they do? The Noid was the only character. That is why you control the Noid and, at the end of every level, you have a pizza-eating contest against different-colored Noids.
The time spent between pizza-eating contests in Yo! Noid is a surprisingly good mix of 8-bit era platforming styles/tropes. In addition to the standard running and jumping stages, the Noid operates skateboards, jetpacks, and other fun level variations. There’s a nice range of settings across the game’s 15 stages. You can fly through them pretty rapidly, and I think the quicker levels make for a more engaging game than a lot of Yo! Noid’s contemporaries, which tended to have longer levels — and fewer of them.
Along the way, you’ll avoid hazards and hurt the people and the animals you see with a yo-yo. Occasionally, you find an item that‘s useful for the next binge eating contest — like hot sauce that will ruin the opponent’s pizza for a round, or pepper that will ruin the opponent’s pizza for a round. Also, if you swing wildly at the air around you, the Noid will occasionally discover a multiplier item for the PEC that leads to big scores and bigger bellyaches for the Noid (I presume).
So, just to clarify — you can’t progress past a level without conquering the (increasingly difficult) pizza-eating contests, so players must be mindful of their resources for the impending turn-based face-off.
You wouldn't confuse Yo! Noid for Marvel Snap, but in both games, it all comes down to collecting cards and playing them at the right time. Sometimes it means Spider-Man fighting against Dr. Doom, sometimes it means you’re eating more pizzas in a pizza-eating contest than the other Noid. You say tomato, I say tomato. That phrase really loses something in print, huh?
I’m not trying to overemphasize the significance of the Domino's Pizza video game, but fans of these things (deckbuilding games, vintage NES titles, pizza) might want to give it a look. And also, you should play it, because if you don’t — I heard the Noid broke out of his pen and is on the prowl. He’s like this again, and he’ll come for your ass.
So, what’s the ultimate connection to Balatro and Yo! Noid? I don’t know. I like them both. There's deck stuff in them. I’m gonna go play Balatro now.
Thank you as always for reading. If you enjoyed this and aren’t already subscribed, go ahead and enter your email below and then you’ll be sure to be notified as soon as I play the fan-made Nintendo 64-style sequel, Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void.
