Pizza Tower

About

Pizza Tower is a 2023 Wario Land inspired high speed action-platformer by Indie developer 'Tour De Pizza' on Steam. It is known for having a 1990's cartoon art style resembling MS paint, a soundtrack full of 16-bit instrumentation and funk/hip-hop sampling, immensely over the top Boss Battles and NPCs, and featuring Mort the Chicken from the titular PS1 game. It follows Peppino, a severely mentally unstable Italian chef (and his fellow chef companion Gustavo) who's trying to stop his already failing Pizzeria from being completely run out of business by the antagonistic forces of the eponymous Tower.

Origin

On March 13th, 2018, a comic artist known as Mcpig uploaded initial sketches and ideas for what was then called "The Leaning Tower of Pizza" to his 'weinerdontusedrugs^[1]' page on Tumblr, explaining core mechanics and detailing his thought process. On April 25th, 2018^[2] this was expanded upon, with him also displaying some of the sprites and character designs he made. It took ideas from a previously scrapped idea called 'Pizza Massacre', which was about a chef character being transported to a nightmare world where he has to battle demonic pizza creatures.

On October 4th, 2018, the developer uploaded test footage of the cancelled 'Pizza Massacre' game on YouTube^[3].

It was later revealed in 2019 that the idea for the 'Peppino Spaghetti' character actually predates both game concepts.

Pizza Tower, as it'd soon be known as, would eventually have quite a few crossovers with different indie games as well as mods for other games, such as Rivals of Aether, Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart^[5], DOOM 2 ^[6], Mushroom Kingdom Fusion^[7] and Mega Man "8-bit Deathmatch"^[8], some made by Mcpig himself.

Fan Community

In 2019, the game would release four public demos, with the most prominent one coming out on that year's SAGE and leading to a large rise in its' notoriety. Vinny of Vinesauce and 'Roegame' both did playthroughs of each demo, while 'hotcyder' covered it in a video about 'wario-likes' and SiIvaGunner did a Wario-based "rip" of the song 'It's Pizza Time'. The most popular video prior to it's release was June 12, 2019's Pizza Pootis, a TF2 fan short very heavily stylized after it, which already sat at over 3 million views by that point.

Every build after 2019 was released via the game's Patreon, allowing access to things such as a level editor, versus mode and more for $5 a month donations. Donators were later added to the game as 'Pizzasonas', appearing in the 'secret' segments.

The creator often made development streams on Twitch and would interact with fans through his chat. Thanks to that and other factors, Pizza Tower grew a large following that was fond of emulating the game's distinctiveness through fan content like meme edits, art, music, mods, and even fully fledged fan games, all years before the eventual release. One example would be the Scoutdigo mod. The most popular example is an AU known as Sugary Spire ^[4], which would release a full public test demo on May 14th, 2022 after intially being cancelled. Another well known project is 'Pizza Tower Repainted' which is more commonly known as 'Piss Towel', a reskin mod with a rather controversial history. Eventually someone made a repainted version of the aforementioned 'Sugary Spire' in the style of 'Piss Towel'.

Pizza Tower had an official discord server with a lot of commonly used in-jokes. However, it was eventually shut-down in March of 2023. It also has both a serious fan wiki and a joke one. The serious wiki, however, was abandoned by the main users running it due to rising concerns regarding FANDOM (the wiki creator service hosting it) and a non-FANDOM oriented wiki was created via Miraheze in late 2023.