Avoid the Noid (PC) Playthrough
202A playthrough of ShareData's 1989 license-based action game for Dos PCs, Avoid the Noid.
80s corporate mascots were a strange and terrifying force of nature, especially when it came to food. Between doowopping raisins, attitude-laden cheetahs, and giant dancing rat robots, there was no shortage of creepy characters designed to appeal to people's wallets through their stomachs.
And then there was the Noid.
The Noid, a creepy man in a red bunny costume, was the face of Domino's Pizza in the late 80s. In the TV commercials, the Noid was on a mission to ruin people's pizzas before they could be delivered... in thirty minutes or less.
The Noid sold millions of pizzas to the masses, inspired a mentally ill man to hold up a Domino's joint at gunpoint, and even managed to star in a couple video games before being phased out in the nineties. He looked like a crazed sex pervert, but there's no denying the mark he left on pop culture.
Followed only by Capcom's Yo! Noid for the NES, Avoid the Noid was the first game to be based on the character when it was released for IBM-compatible PCs and the Commodore 64 in 1989.
The president of Doom Industries has ordered Domino's, and as the delivery boy, it is your job to get the pizza to the office on the thirtieth floor of the corporate headquarters within a half-hour.
However, that task is easier said than done. The building has been overrun with Noids bent on destroying your precious cargo and the building's missile defenses have been put on high alert.
The delivery boy will have to avoid all the hazards as he answers potentially booby-trapped pay phones and searches for keys that'll grant access to higher floors. If he manages to survive all of that, he'll then be forced to face off against a water-balloon chucking attack chopper before finally making it to the office to drop his payload.
All in all, Avoid the Noid is way better than you'd expect from a game designed to hock fast food. The simple arcade-style action is both fun and challenging, the controls are responsive, and it'll take quite a few tries to figure out the best strategies for each floor.
I used to play this as a kid on my dad's Tandy 1000TX, and more than anything else, it was the sound that stuck with me. The game constantly blares loud, obnoxious music through the internal PC speaker, but that's not all - it also uses the speaker to play back 1-bit digitized PCM samples. If you love to hate the Noid, just wait until you hear his shrill, freaky laugh echoing from the depths of your computer case. It's as cool as it is unnerving.
Avoid the Noid is a game that I hold a lot of fond nostalgia for, so I thought it might be fun to unearth and share it with you guys.
So what do you all think? I love it, but I'm really curious about how other people view it.
And to any Domino's drivers out there watching: is this an accurate depiction of the job?
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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