Pizza Tower. At first glance, this game looks like it has relatively little story.
We’re shown cut scenes at the beginning of the game that practically tell us everything that
we need to know. It's the story of one man running around trying to save a struggling
restaurant from an evil floating pizza that's threatening to blast his business with a laser.
It is a thin plot that merely serves as an excuse to kick off the action. But oh no friends,
this game is so much deeper than that. Hidden in the background, the developers have put a
whole history here. A history of betrayals, of war, of cloning. And if you follow their clues,
you'll see that our heroic chef may just have been the true villain from the very beginning.
Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory: Better evidence. Better theories. Game Theory. I hope
you're hungry, loyal theorists, because today we're serving up a slice of piping hot lore
courtesy of Pizza Tower, the intensely viral indie smash hit that released back in January.
I might be a little late to the party on this one, huh? If I were the pizza delivery guy,
this one would have to be free. Now, for those who weren't keeping
up with it during its development, Pizza Tower is a frantic action platformer in the style of the
Wario Land franchise. Actually one of a handful of Wario-likes that's been cropping up over the
past few years, like Antonblast and Treasure Tech Land. Basically, the game's developer, MCPig,
saw that Nintendo hadn't made a new Wario Land in over a decade and said, Fine, I'll-a do it myself.
Terrible. Absolute garbage. Anyway, five years and a whole lot of Patreon support later the game is
here and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, with Pizza Tower becoming one of
the highest rated Steam games of the year mere hours after its release, people immediately fell
in love with its blistering fast gameplay. The Ren and Stimpy art style, the absolute
absurdity of these characters and their world. And of course, like any good indie game,
there's a heaping helping of hidden lore in the secret sauce. Lore that is very easy to overlook
when the vast majority of the gameplay has you running through levels at absolute top speed.
But let me tell you, not only is there lore in here, when you stop and pay attention to it,
it actually turns everything that players have assumed about this game on its head.
Our main character, Peppino, is much more than just a hapless pizzeria owner trying
to save his struggling restaurant. He's a man who brought all of this on himself, and our
actions through the game are just perpetuating a continued cycle of abuse and violence. That's
right. It is a classic Game Theory theory. The hero may just have been the villain all along.
Are you all ready to get funky? Let's begin. For those of you who haven't played Pizza Tower yet,
here's the basic plot. While lamenting his failed pizzeria, Peppino Spaghetti,
yes that is his real name, is visited by Pizzaface, a sentient floating pizza that's
threatening to destroy Peppino’s with a laser cannon. So to save his business, the naturally
anxious Peppino goes on a rampage, running down anyone who gets in his way as he chases
Pizzaface to the top of the titular Pizza Tower. Peppino runs at mach speed, climbs walls like
Spider-Man on caffeine and beats the ever loving snot out of any sentient foodstuff that just so
happens to cross his path. Rest in peace there Snotty. At the end of each stage Peppino knocks
down Pillar John, a living stone slab that Pizzaface cloned repeatedly and then placed
in each level to keep the portals of the tower open permanently. Knocking him down triggers a
countdown sequence a la Wario Land 4, or a final Metroid style escape, where Peppino must get back
to the beginning of the level as fast as possible before Pizzaface catches him. As you climb through
the tower you go through dozens of wacky places like a city of pigs, a farm beset by aliens,
a literal war zone, and an abandoned pizzeria haunted by ghastly animatronics… Oh, come on! get
out! I can't... I can't. Is there no rest?!? Gahh. If Peppino manages to reach the top,
he's finally able to confront Pizzaface, who it's revealed isn't actually a floating pizza monster,
but rather some kind of mech secretly piloted by none other than Pizza Head. A guy with
a pizza for a head. This game's naming conventions are pretty self-explanatory.
Anyway, it's an odd reveal because this is a character who's never shown up previously in the
game and was never explicitly alluded to. As such, at first glance it seems to be a twist villain
just for the sake of having a twist villain. And honestly, I'd be totally okay with that. This is a
joke game where nothing is taken super seriously, so having our floating pizza head be replaced by
an actual pizza man is the sort of ridiculous twist that would make a lot of sense here.
But we are theorists. When we see a surprise final boss appear without any clear build up,
that's the sort of thing that sets off all kinds of alarms. If you stop and take a closer look at
our true final boss here, everything about Pizza Head is pretty weird. For the big boss of the game
he never seems to take the final fight seriously. He starts the fight by handing Peppino a gun. He
accidentally pulls out a dirty picture of himself. He shoots a machine gun at his own face instead of
at Peppino. He is laughing the entire time. It's almost as if he's not trying to kill Peppino at
all. Just mess with him. If he wanted to kill Peppino, he could've just fired the laser at
Peppino’s Pizza without warning instead of giving him a chance to stop it. Except the
laser isn't anywhere to be found when Peppino gets to the top of the tower. Nor can I find
it in any other level. The only explanation is that there was never a laser in the first
place and that all of this was a trick to lure Peppino to the tower for some greater purpose.
But why? Well, to understand that we actually have to play through the game again. See once
you know to be on the lookout for Pizza Head, the signs are there from the very beginning of the
game. Literally. The first enemy that you face in the tutorial is a cardboard cutout of Pizza Boy.
A boy with the exact same face as Pizza Head. Notice the blushing cheeks, the big red nose,
and of course, the large slice of pizza as a face. That is suspicious. It would seem that Pizza Head
might just be a grown up version of Pizza Boy. We see later in the FNAF level that Pizza Boy is the
main mascot for Pizza Boy Pizz-Pizza. And that's not the only place that he shows up. World 4,
the slum has a pizza boy cut out, crammed into a sewer pipe. This then leads to multiple cut outs
that we can find littering the sewers throughout the level, as if all of this Pizza Boy merch was
suddenly discarded all at once. Later in the game, when visiting the Pig City, you can see wanted
posters at the beginning of the level as well as at the beginning of the vigilante’s boss fight.
Peppino is a wanted man, with a million dollar bounty on his head? That is, like,
John Wick levels of bounty hanging over him. What did he do? Later in the Pig City level,
Peppino gets arrested. And what do we find waiting for us in the cell? Lo and behold,
another Pizza Boy cut out, just waiting there, acting almost like a calling card.
Is he the one behind all of this? Could it be that he's the one putting up the wanted posters? And
when Pig City eventually goes up in flames, graffiti of Pizza Boy’s smiling face can be
seen peeking out from between the buildings like he's reveling in all this destruction. Finally,
at the very end of the game, just as Peppino and friends are about to reach the exit of
the crumbling tower, a horde of Pizza Boy cutouts appear in a last ditch effort to slow them down,
both bookending the cutouts from the beginning of the tutorial, as well as signaling that Pizza
Boy himself is the thing trying to keep Peppino from escaping. Pizza Boy is always there. He is
always watching. He is always impeding Peppino’s progress. He even reacts to how well you're doing
in the game. When you first boot up the game, a Pizza Boy face is used to measure your current
completion percentage. He begins Happy when you're at 0%, but he starts getting sad when
he sees that you've made some progress. Bit by bit, he gets angrier and angrier. Quickly
losing all resemblance to Pizza Boy and instead gaining the appearance of Pizza Head instead.
If Pizza Boy were a distinct entity, it wouldn't make sense for him to be worked up by Peppino’s
success. But if he's really Pizza Head, then of course he's getting mad because you're getting
closer and closer to foiling his plot. Which then begs the question, what's the plot? All these
clues seem to suggest that Pizza Head was once the mascot and potential owner of Pizza Boy Piz-Pizza.
But we still don't know what beef he has with Peppino. If he's just going after some competing
pizza chef, why target someone whose business is already in the tank? While Pizza Head himself
doesn't have any dialog in the game to fill us in on his motives. There is one NPC who does:
Pizza Granny. She is just like Pizzaface; she is a pizza, she's got a face. She appears in
the hub world before each level to tell you things like how to use your taunt to parry projectiles,
or how it's unfortunate that your name is Peppino Spaghetti. Usually her dialog is short and snappy.
She's basically just there as a tutorial. But in one encounter in the Western District,
he suddenly spouts off on this huge rant. The syntax is all off and it's hard to parse
what exactly she's trying to say. But one nugget of information stands out among all the rest,
quote: “In the upper part of the tower, there's this Pizzaface character. Then there's a man
from your previous life leading the way.” Since Pizza Head’s the only one up there,
it's not much of a stretch to figure out that he's the man from Peppino's past.
But again I ask, what is their actual backstory here? Why is Pizza Head out for revenge? Well,
it all comes back around, as it so often does, to FNAF. Specifically the FNAF level
I keep mentioning: Don't Make a Sound. It's the second to last level of the game which
already places it in an important position. But what's really interesting about this
one are all the lore clues that are sprinkled throughout the various background environments.
The first thing to notice is the poster that clearly indicates Pizzaboy Pizz-Pizza is going
bankrupt, which could explain why all the Pizza Boy cut outs were thrown down in the
sewers throughout the slums map. So we know for a fact that Pizza Head’s restaurant hit on hard
times. We can also see in the storage room of the pizzeria that the dead body of a safety inspector
is hanging from the ceiling, trapped by one of the many dangerous toys that are hidden away in boxes.
That might be one good reason the restaurant hit on such hard financial times. Nothing says fallen
profits quite like having a series of murders happening in your back rooms. Ain't that right,
Willy? But it's the series of posters here that I really want to examine. The first
one shows us the game's third boss, The Noise used to be a mascot of Pizz-Pizza.
Now, for a bit of context here, The Noise is a parody of Domino's mascot, The Noid,
a character who is notorious for being one of the worst restaurant mascots in all of history.
We actually recently did a Food Theory all about him and how he single handedly caused a hostage
situation at a restaurant. So if you haven't seen that video or aren't familiar with the character,
check that one out after you're done here. But based on the photos that we see around
the level, The Noise was a key part of Pizz-Pizza's marketing strategy,
and apparently he wasn't the only one. Over here on some of the other posters, you can see
a stretchy cheese slime character. Now cheese slimes are a common enemy throughout the game,
so this could be a stretch. Get it? Stretch. Because he's… he's cheese. But I don't think
that that right there is just any character. I suspect that that slime, just like The Noise,
is also a boss in the tower, specifically the boss of floor two: The Vigilante. For proof
look at the eyes. Notice the pupils of a normal cheese slime versus the pupils of the Vigilante.
The Vigilante has pinprick pupils as opposed to the common enemies which have more oblong
pupils. Now look at the slime that's used in this poster: Pinprick eyes. Eyes that match
the vigilante. So we have ourselves the second floor boss being a former mascot of the brand,
the third floor boss being a former mascot of the brand, and the final floor boss; Pizza Head,
being Pizza Boy, the main face of the company. I don't know about you, but I'm noticing a
pattern here. And that pattern only continues as we look at more details in the level. You
see as we run through the remains of Pizz-Pizza, there are other familiar faces that start popping
up. For instance, Peppino’s chef friend Gustavo appears here multiple times, first as a Gustavo
marionette guiding us forward, but also as a character in an arcade cabinet: Pizza Crawler.
Why would he be here of all places? Why would there be merch and spin off titles dedicated
to him unless he also worked at Pizz-Pizza at some point? But even more suspicious,
Peppino himself used to work at Piz-Pizza as a mascot. Throughout the level we see various arcade
cabinets starring Peppino: Pizza Tower Defense, Pizza Tower Golf. But if there was any doubt,
there's one poster that's hidden just out of view that shows Peppino chasing after the Pizza,
Gremlins, Noise and Noisette. In other words, Peppino used to be a mascot of Pizz-Pizza
too. Every single one of these characters used to be a part of the Piz-Pizza brand.
They were all mascots or marketing characters or involved in the business in some way. They
all have a shared history with Pizza Head as the literal and figurative head of it all.
But it seems like at some point Peppino broke off from the others to make his own
pizza business. I suspect that somehow, some way that decision killed Pizz-Pizza,
hence why we see the company going bankrupt. Why do I think this? Well, in one of the other
posters we see Peshino, the Italian chef, an animatronic-like character that looks exactly
like Peppino. And not only does he look like Pepino, if you get jump scared by one of the
monsters in this level, you'll respawn as Pashino. That right there shows you that you
and Pashino are meant to be one and the same. I think this was Pizz-Pizza trying to find a
replacement for Peppino. When Peppino left to strike it out on his own,
it left all the other characters high and dry. Suddenly they were left with one of their star
characters gone. So in a desperate bid to replace him, they tried puppets and robotics
and marionettes, but none of them worked. And that's when they started getting really
desperate. They started cloning Peppino. You see, once you reach the boss of the fourth floor,
things in the game get real weird. If your theorist alarms weren't set off by anything
else in this game, floor four should be putting them into high alert. It's here that we fight
Peppino himself. Yep. We are fighting ourselves. Or more accurately, a twisted clone version of
ourselves: He's taller, his eyes popping out, and oh yeah, there's also literally dozens of
them all attacking at once. He’ll even throw his head at us when things get desperate. But why is
there a clone of our character running around? Well, we actually see the lab where these clones
get made in the final level of the game simply titled: War. In this level, you literally fight
your way across a war torn landscape with fighter planes and bombs in the air. It.
Is. Weird. So much so that it prompted the fans to come up with their very own Game Theories,
mostly centering around the idea that Peppino is actually a war vet. Now McPig, the game's creator,
did come out and debunked that theory on discord, but then they also made some tweets
that would imply that theories might be true. So it feels like that whole thing is up for
debate. All that though is neither here nor there. What I want to focus on is the background of some
of the screens in this level. In them we see copies of Peppino floating around in stasis
tubes. What's it mean? It means that he's being cloned. But why? Well, the clue is given to us
back during that fourth floor boss fight. Look at the background and notice what it
says in the window. Peppino’s Pizza 2. And that's not all. At the end of the fight,
there's an extended horror chase sequence. If you manage to survive, you emerge on the
other side and are suddenly standing out front of an old defunct building named Bruno Pizza.
Their rebranding failed abandoned pizzerias as Peppino’s. It's Pizza Head trying to make his
own Peppino franchise, they're creating Peppino clones to steal away his business. Not because
it's particularly successful or anything like that, but as repayment for Peppino’s
Betrayal when he first left the Pizz-Pizza family. So taking all of these clues together, here is the
final storyline that I've pieced together based on the clues hidden in the game. Pizz-Pizza was
a highly successful company that would regularly roll out new mascots for marketing purposes to
build up hype. The Noise, Noisette, Gustavo Cheeseslimes. But at the top of the heap, there
was Pizza Boy, the literal face of the company. The pizza tower is his family home,
as evidenced by the portraits that hang of the game's opening hallway. But of them all,
there was one mascot who would rise to challenge the popularity of Pizza Boy:
Peppino. A chef character who would get taunted and trolled by the Noise twins, a beleaguered
everyman who made some pretty darn good pizza. When he was first introduced his popularity took
off and Pizz-Pizza put him everywhere, including multiple spin off arcade games. But eventually,
Peppino wanted to move on, to strike it out on his own. He was popular enough, he could
become his own solo act. This, to Pizza Head, a former child actor, was the ultimate betrayal.
They were family. You don't just leave family. Desperate to replace him, Pizza Head and the
rest of the crew created Pashino; an animatronic version of Peppino. It didn't work. Pizz-Pizza
started to struggle. Meanwhile, things were doing okay for Peppino. Not great,
but he was making enough to get by. Pizz-Pizza was still pulling in a lot of customers,
it was his biggest competition. And so Peppino decided to play a little dirty.
You see, because of the time that he spent working at the company, Peppino had one final ace up his
sleeve. He knew the dangerous secrets that lurked in the back of Pizz-Pizza, the failed and deadly
products that Pizza Head had tried to sweep under the rug. So Peppino called for an emergency health
and safety inspection of the restaurant, hoping to get his competition shut down once and for all.
Then his pizza company would be the last one standing. It would finally be able to thrive.
Was he betraying his former coworkers? Sure. But this was business after all. And the thing is,
his plan worked. In fact, it worked a little bit too well. The health inspector came, got caught
up in one of the dangerous backroom toys and died. Pizz-Pizza wasn't just slapped on the wrist with
a low health score. It was suddenly hit with massive fines for safety violations.
News spread of the death that had happened at Pizz-Pizza. This resulted in the business
going bankrupt in a hurry. Leaving all these characters like the Noise, the Vigilante,
Noisette. All of them with no place to go except to linger on inside of Pizzahead's family tower,
plotting some kind of revenge against the man who had abandoned them and then sabotaged them.
The Pizz-Pizza crew came up with wilder and wilder stories until finally landing on cloning. They
created dozens of alternate Peppinos. This was no longer about getting business back. This was about
revenge. This was about taking his business down along with them. This was war, a mutually assured
destruction. They would put the clones into shoddy copycat pizzerias in low income areas
of the neighborhood to hurt the Peppino brand. And it worked. Peppino’s original restaurant was
crushed by the debt. And so there they all were, miserable, destroyed together, which meant it was
the perfect time for Pizzahead to give Peppino a visit, to lure Peppino back to the tower and
reunite the Pizz-Pizza family once again. To force Peppino to confront all these moments,
these places, these characters from his past. And that is where the actual story of Pizza
Tower begins and where our story today ends. Now, if you'll excuse me,
I'm going to go have a salad. But hey! That's just a theory. A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching.
And hey, if you want to learn more about the dark history of the Domino's Noid, that video is on
the left. Make sure you take a munch out of that button you see on screen right now. Or, if all
this pizza talk has you a little bit thirsty. Take a swig of the video on the right where we
pick apart the disturbing lore of Only Cans. As always, my friends, I'll see you next week.