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

Pizza Tower at first glance this game looks like it has relatively little story we're showing 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 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 cause 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 who aren'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 Anton blast 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 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 absolute absurdity of these characters in their world and of course like any good indie game there's a heap and 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 Pepino is much more than just a hapless pizzeria owner trying to save a 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 papino spaghetti yes that is his real name is visited by pizzaface a sentient floating pizza that's threatening to destroy pepinos with a laser cannon so to save his business the naturally anxious Pepino goes on a rampage running down anyone who gets in his way as he Aces 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 snot out of any sentient food stuff that

just so happens across his path rest in peace there snotty 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 Wario Land 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 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 I can is there no rest God if Pepino manages to reach 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 head this game's naming inventions 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 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 top of the tower nor can I 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 Laura Pepino 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 piss pizza and that's not the only place that he shows up World 4 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 Vigilantes boss light Pepino is a wanted man with a million dollar bounty on his

head as 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 Boys 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 Justice 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 zero percent but he starts getting sad when 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 but we still don't know what beef he has with Pepino if he's just going after some competing Pizza Chef why Target someone whose business is already in the tank well Pizza head himself doesn't have any dialogue in the game to fill us in his motives there is one NPC who does pizza granny she is just like pizza face 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 pepino spaghetti usually her dialogue 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 RAM 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 from Pepino's past but again I asked 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 Pizza piss 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 pizzahead'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 toy 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 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 his pizza now for a bit of context here the noise is a parody of dominoes mascot the Noid a character who's 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 his 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 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 pin prick pupils as opposed to the common enemies which have more oblong pupils now look at the Slime that's used in this poster pin prick 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 levels you see as we run through the remains of his pizza there are other familiar faces that start popping up for instance a Pino'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 his pizza at some point but even more suspicious Pepino himself used to work at piz Pizza as a mascot throughout the level we see various arcade cabinets starring Pepino 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 Pepino chasing after the

pizza Gremlins noise and noise at in other words Pepino used to be a mascot of pis 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 Pepino broke off from the others to make his own pizza business I suspect that somehow some way that decision killed his pizza hence why

we see the company going bankrupt why do I think this well in one of the other posters we see pashino the Italian chef an animatronic-like character that looks exactly like Pepino 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 Pacino that right there shows you that you and pashino are meant to be one and the same I think this was piz Pizza trying to find a replacement 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 Robotics and marionettes but none of them worked and that's when they started getting really desperate they started cloning Pepino 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 4 should be put numb into high alert it's here that we fight Pepino 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 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 note is what it says in the window the Pinos 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 pepinos it's Pizza head trying to make his own Pepino

franchise they're creating Pepino 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 his 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 challenge the popularity of pizza boy Pepino 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 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 pizzahead a former child actor was the ultimate betrayal they were family they don't just leave family desperate to replace him Pizza head and the rest of the crew created pashino an animatronic version of Pepino didn't work his pizza started to struggle meanwhile things were doing okay for Pepino not great but he was making enough to get by his pizza was still pulling in a lot of customers it was his biggest competition and so Pepino decided to play a little dirty you see because of the time that

he spent working at the company Pepino had one final Ace up his sleeve he knew the dangerous secrets that lurked in the back of his pizza the failed and deadly products that pizza had tried to sweep under the rug so Pepino called for an emergency health and safety inspection at 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 this 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 piz 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 piz Pizza crew came up with wilder and Wilder stories until finally landing on cloning 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 they would put the Clones into shoddy copycat pizzerias in low-income areas of the neighborhood to hurt the Pepino brand and it work to Pino'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 Pepino a visit to Laura Pepino back to the Tower and reunite the piz Pizza family once again to force Pepino 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 gonna go have a salad but hey that 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 cams as always my friends I'll see you next week