Did you know The Noid is officially old enough to run for president? Well, he is, which might explain why Domino’s Pizza execrable imp returns to public life with the Crash Bandicoot infinite runner that launched on mobile platforms last week.
The Noid, whose last video game appearance was 1990’s Yo! Noid for the NES, comes courtesy of another title with a thing for exclamation points: Crash Bandicoot: On the Run! In the game, Noid is a mini-boss opposing Crash, who is only old enough to run for the House of Representatives. Players can avail themselves of in-game pizza-themed skins if they like.
Domino’s has also brought The Noid back to its TV ads beginning Monday, to tout the chain’s test run of robot pizza delivery down in Houston. A news release from Domino’s said that Nuro’s R2 driverless car is more than a match for the gremlin’s pizza-spoiling insurgency.
The Noid, whose goal in life is to skunk a pizza before Domino’s can deliver it in less than 30 minutes, first starred in the 1989 platforming advergame Avoid the Noid for Commodore 64 and MS-DOS PCs. Capcom followed with Yo! Noid! in the spring of 1990, launching it in the West that November. Notably, it was one of the games on the PlayChoice-10, the rare Nintendo arcade cabinet that played NES console games.
