Avoid the Noid is a goofy little single player platform game that was originally developed for the Commodore 64 by Blue Sky Software. It was later converted for play on the personal computer running the MS-DOS operating system by the designers at California Merchandising Concepts. The entire game centers around an eighties advertising campaign launched by the Domino’s Pizza chain.
In the Domino’s advertisements for television and print, a fictitious creature called the Noid that wandered around destroying people’s pizzas, and thus needed to be avoided to preserve the pizzas.
The video game, Avoid the Noid, builds on this idea. The gamer will play the part of a protagonistic pizza delivery boy who has been charged with delivering pizzas to the top floor of a large apartment skyscraper where the Doom Industries headquarters are located. The floors of the apartment building serve as platforms, which the pizza delivery boy can ascend using both stairs and elevators. All through the apartment complex are Noids and pitfall style traps. While the delivery boy is armed with a very limited quantity of Noid Avoiders (which automatically clear a screen of all visible Noids), most Noids, as well as the traps, have to simply be avoided to bypass. Of course, with such a great number of both, this
is easier said than done.
The game is set up so that each screen represents three floors of the apartment building. The traps will drop the pizza delivery boy down to the lowest level on the screen and force him to begin his climb again, still avoiding Noids. There are elevators for the delivery boy to use, and they mark the only safe areas in the entire skyscraper. There is some basic puzzle solving involved with many of the elevators, since sometimes the pizza delivery boy has to locate a specific key in order to activate the elevator. As the boy gains more and more levels, the traps will become more in depth than simple trap doors. There will be pizza seeking missiles, Noids with bazookas, and an overall greater quantity of Noids.
Although Avoid the Noid is a blatant advertisement for Domino’s Pizza, it is still colorful, engaging, and cleverly done. The concept is a little weird, but any child of the eighties will certainly remember the maniacal, jester-like Noid that threatened everyone’s pizzas, and will assuredly be able to relate to this game. For gamers too new to recall the Noid commercials, the game does have some merit at face value as a solid platformer.
