Avoid The Noid
- Brand
- Domino's
- Year
- 1989
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- In-Game
- Agency
- BlueSky Software
- Added
- October 2026
- 1
A title screen with the game logo and the Domino's mascot leads into a credits screen and a brief setup: the player is a Domino's delivery driver who must get a pizza to the top floor of Doom Industries before a 30-minute clock runs out, or lose the customer's business and the job.
- 2
Each screen is a side-view building section showing three floors at once; the player works through it like a platformer level, running and climbing in a zigzag path from the bottom floor to an elevator that leads to the next screen.
- 3
Movement options are walking, running, jumping, and ducking/sliding; Noids patrolling the floors cannot be fought, only dodged, jumped over, or slid under.
- 4
Noids attack in several ways — knocking the courier down, stomping the pizza, charging, firing rockets, or dropping water balloons from planes — and hidden floor trap doors drop the player a level and cost time.
- 5
Losing the pizza to a Noid costs one of a limited supply that functions as lives; running out ends the game. A limited-use panic button, the Noid Avoider, clears all Noids and incoming rockets from the screen when activated.
- 6
Wall-mounted phones can be answered to find keys or digits of a security code, but some are booby-trapped by Noids and explode when picked up.
- 7
Elevators carry the player to the next screen, but some are locked and require a key or a three-digit code recovered from the phones to proceed.
- 8
The upper floors add a rooftop section with falling water balloons on fixed paths, while previously collected keys respawn in their original phones after a delay.
- 9
The run ends at a password-locked door near the top of the building; entering it lets the courier hand over the pizza and complete the delivery, with the remaining time out of the original 30 minutes shown on screen.
- 10
Difficulty rises with altitude: higher floors have more Noids and introduce ranged attacks, while the box promises 11 different screens and 30 levels across a 30-story building.
Objective
Domino's pizzas were arriving cold and late, and the 1986 "Avoid the Noid" campaign had already turned every delivery mishap into the fault of a single red gremlin, selling the promise that Domino's was "Noid-proof" and delivered in 30 minutes or less. The game extended that mascot into a format kids could own and replay at home: Domino's own research found 6-to-12-year-olds were the character's biggest fans, and the company was already building a merchandising business around him.
Solution
The player is a Domino's delivery driver racing a pizza up through Doom Industries, a high-rise shown in cross-section three floors at a time. Moving up the building means running, jumping, and sliding under the Noids — the red creatures from the TV spots — who are trying to wreck the pizza; fighting them off isn't an option, only dodging. Keys and a three-digit code needed to keep climbing are hidden inside the building's wall-mounted phones, and the player carries a limited stock of Noid Avoider power-ups to fend off the creatures along the way. A 30-minute countdown ticks the whole time, mirroring the ad campaign's delivery promise, and the run ends either when the clock runs out or the Noids have ruined every pizza the player is carrying.
Can you still play it?
Sources
There's no official re-release: Avoid the Noid survives only as the 1989 floppy release for MS-DOS and Commodore 64. You can still play it in your browser through the Internet Archive's emulation of the original, which preserves both versions. No date or reason for its withdrawal from sale is documented.
