Avoid the Noid

Avoid the Noid is a platformer developed by BlueSky Software and published by ShareData in 1989 for MS-DOS and the Commodore 64, and it exists for the most American reason imaginable: to sell pizza. It stars a Domino's delivery boy who must climb a high-rise apartment building infested with Noids, the manic red-suited saboteur from the chain's inescapable late-1980s claymation commercials, and deliver a pizza to the top floor within thirty minutes, honoring the delivery guarantee Domino's was famous for at the time. The Noids attack with water balloons, bazookas, and traps across the building's floors and elevators, and the player counters with limited defenses while racing the clock. As a game it is a modest, tricky single-screen climber; as an artifact it is priceless, one of the purest examples of the fast-food advergame, a lane of American game history in which a corporation's marketing budget produced a full boxed retail product. Alongside the later Yo! Noid on the NES, it preserved a mascot who has since become a piece of 1980s nostalgia in his own right. Nothing on a most-American-games list says more about the country than a platformer that exists to move pizzas, sold at the counter alongside the product it advertised.