Game Theory - Sauce, Cheese, REVENGE! (Pizza Tower)

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the saucy LORE of Pizza Tower! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick, Tom Robinson, and Joey Lima Editors: AbsolutePixel, Daniel Zemke, Tyler Mascola, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Pizza Tower. At first glance, this game looks like it has relatively little story. We're shown cutscenes 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 threatened into 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 hero,

Roic Chef may just have been the true villain from the very beginning. Oh, 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, uh, 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 of you weren't keeping up with it during its development, Pizza Tower is a frantic action platformer in the style of the Wario Land franchise. 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 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 Renan Stimpy Art Style. absurdity of these characters in their world. And of course, like any good indie game, there's a heaping helping of hidden lore in the secret sauce. Law, 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, Pepino 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 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 haven't played Pizza Tower yet, here's the basic plot.

While lamenting his failed pizzeria, Pupino Spaghetti, yes, that is his real name, is visited by Pizza Face. A sentient floating pizza that's threatening to destroy Pupinos with a laser cannon. So to save his business, the naturally anxious Pupino goes on a rampage, running down anyone who gets in his way as he chases Pizza Face to the top of the titular Pizza Tower. Pepino runs at Mach Speed, climbs walls like Spider-Man on caffeine, and beats the ever-loving snod out of any sentient food stuff that just so happens to cross his path.

Rest in peace there, Snoddy. At the end of each stage, Pepino knocks down Pillar John, a living stone slab that Pizza Face 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 Warioland 4, or a final Metroid-style escape, where Pepino must get back to the beginning of the level as fast as possible before Pizza Face catches in.

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? God! If Papino manages to reach to the top, he's finally able to confront Pizza Face, 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... 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 buildup, 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 Pepino a gun. He accidentally pulls out a dirty picture of himself.

He shoots a machine gun at his own face instead of at Pepino. He is laughing the entire time. It's almost as if he's not trying to kill Pepino at all. Just mess with him. If you wanted to kill Pepino, he could have just fired the laser at Pepino's pizza without warning instead of giving him a chance to stop it. Except the laser isn't anywhere to be found when Pepino gets to the the top of the tower, nor could 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 Papino 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, sling 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 Fnaff level that Pizza Boy is the main mascot for Pizza Boy Piz Pizza. And that's not the only place that he shows up. World Four, the slum, has a Pizza Boy cutout crammed into a sewer pipe. This then leads to multiple cutouts 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. Pepino is a wanted man with a million dollar bounty on his head. It was like John Wick levels of bounty hanging over him.

What did he do? Later in the Pig City level, Pepino gets arrested. And what do we find waiting for us in the cell? Lo and behold, another Pizza Boy cutout 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 Pepino 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 book-ending the cutouts from the beginning of the tutorial, as well as signaling that Pizza Boy himself is the thing trying to keep Pepino from escaping. Pizza Boy is always there.

He is always watching. He is always impeding Pepino'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 Pepino'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 Boy Piz Pizza, but we still don't know what beef he has with Pupino. If he's just going after some competing pizza chef, why targets someone whose business is already in the tank? Well, Pizza Head himself doesn't have any dialogue in the game to fill us in and his motives, there is one NPC who does. Pizza Granny. She is just like pizza face. She's 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 peri projectiles, or how it's unfortunate that your name is Pippino Spaghetti. Usually her dialogue is short and snappy. She's basically just there as a tutorial. But in one in counter in the Western District, she 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 Pizza Face 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 for Pepino'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's so often done.

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 Pizza Piz Pizza is going bankrupt, which could explain why all the Pizza Boy cutouts 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 backrooms. Ain't that right, Willie. But it's the series of posters here that I really want to examine. The first one shows us that the game's third boss, The Noise, used to be a mascot of Piz Pizza. Now, for a bit of context here, the Noise is a parody of Domino's mascot, The Noid, a character who's notorious for being one of the worst restaurant mascots in all of history.

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 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 2, 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 pan, 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 Piz Pizza, there are other familiar faces that start popping up. For instance, Pippino'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 Piz Pizza at some point? But even more suspicious, Pippino himself used to work at Piz Pizza as a mascot. Throughout the level, we see various arcade cabinets starring Pupino, 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 Pupino chasing after the Pizza Gremlin's Noise and Noisette. In other words, Pippino used to be a mascot of Piz Pizza 2. 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. But it seems like at some point, Pepino broke off from the others to make his own pizza business. I suspect that somehow, some way that decision killed Piz Pizza. Hence why we see the company going bankrupt. Why do I think this? Well, in one of the other posters we see Pichino, the Italian chef, an animatronic-like character that looks exactly like Pupino.

And not only does he look like Pippino, if you get jump scared by one of the monsters in this level, you'll respawn as Pichino. That right there shows you that you and Pishino are meant to be one and the same. I think this was Piz Pizza trying to find a report. placement for Pepino. When Pepino 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 Puppets and none of them worked and that's when they started getting really desperate. They started cloning Pupino. 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 put them into high alert. It's here that we fight Pupino 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 Pepino is actually a war vet. Now McPig, the game's creator, did come out and debunk that theory on Discord, but then they also made some tweets that would imply that the 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 Pepino 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. Pippino's pizza

too. 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. They're rebranding failed, abandoned pizzerias as Pupino's. It's Pizza Head trying to make his own Pupino franchise. They're creating Pupino clones to steal away his business. Not because it's particularly successful or anything like that, but as repayment for Pepino's betrayal when he first left the Piz Pizza family. So taking all of these clues together, here's the final storyline that I've pieced together based on the clues hidden in the game.

Piz Pizza was a highly successful company that would regularly roll out new mascots for marketing purposes to build up hype. The noise, noisette, Gustavo, cheese slimes, 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 in the game's opening hallway. But of them all, there was one mascot who would rise to cheese challenge the popularity of Pizza Boy, Pupino, a chef character who would get taunted and trolled by the Noise Twins, a beleaguered every man who made some pretty darn good pizza. When he was first introduced, his popularity took off, and Piz Pizza

pizza put him everywhere, including multiple spin-off arcade games. But eventually, Pepino 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 Pichino, an animatronic version of Pupino. Didn't work. Piz Pizza started to struggle. Meanwhile, things were doing okay for Pupino. Not great, but he was making enough to get by.

Piz Pizza was still pulling in a lot of customers. It was his biggest competition. And so Pupino decided to play a little dirty. You see, because of the time that he spent working at the company, the Piz Pino had one final ace of his sleeve. He knew the dangerous secrets that lurked in the back of Piz Pizza, the failed and deadly products that pizza had tried to sweep under the rug. So Pippino called for an emergency health and safety inspection

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 co-workers? Sure, but this was business after all. 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. His 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 his pizza. This resulted in the business going bankrupt in a hurry.

Even all these characters like the noise, the vigilante, noiseette, all of them with no place to go except to linger on inside of Pizza Head'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, uncloning. They created dozens of alternate Pepinos. 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. We would put the clones into shoddy copycat pizzerias in low-income areas of the neighborhood to hurt the Pippino brand and it worked. Pippino'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 Pizza Head to give Pippino a visit to lure Pippino back to the tower and Reunite the Piz Pizza family once again to force Pappino to confront all these moments these places these characters from his past and that's where the actual story of Pizza Tower begins and where our story today ends. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go have a salad. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.