meowdy folks! welcome to the first monthly blog post of 2025! well i'm releasing two days late, so i suppose i missed the mark. but i'll try to get another one out later on this month to make up for it. besides that, i'm already having a great year so far and i'm excited to write this post up since it comes with a special occasion: the anniversary of my favourite game! last month had pizza tower's second anniversary!! pt has been a game i've known about since it's early days and getting to see it grow into the fantastic game it is now put a big smile on my face. and it's wild to think that it has been two years since it released in 2023. time goes by fast when you're having fun i suppose.
in case you don't know what pizza tower is, let me give you the quick run down: you play as super sonic italian man peppino spaghetti and must stop the evil pizzaface from blowing up your pizzeria. its a quite fun wario land inspired platformer. and i suppose thats all that i'll tell you. it is a fantastic game and and i recommend giving it a try yourself! i would love to explain it more but i don't want to clog up this blog post with too much explaination. while i do like to write these posts with the idea that you can understand them if you don't know about the topic beforehand, you are probably going to need a bit of knowledge of pizza tower to understand this one. if you can't give it a spin yourself then maybe watch a friend or someone on the web play it!
now with all of that said, i should talk about what i will be talking about for the rest of this: over my many years of being a pizza tower fan, i have gotten a good amount of files in my hands. i used to be a supporter of the patreon for pizza tower and such i have access to old developement builds. and through that, i also had access to old mods which are built off those old builds as well as other old downloads (like old free demos and mods of those demos). so why don't we take a dive into the past and look at some of these pizza flavoured relics of a bygone era!
first we will start with what was probably a first introduction to pizza tower for a lot of folks (me included!)
the good ol' sage 2019 demo! i found out about it after seeing vinesauce vinny's stream of it and i've heard many others found out about pizza tower because of it. this demo is about 5 years old now, which is the same amount of time the game took to come out since its first ever demo. while the jank it has might be a bit hard to like for new fans, i'm all well to used to it and i still get a kick out of revisiting this early demo time to time (that also might be because i have a deep love of strange jank). the first demo for pizza tower was in 2018 so you can still see tour de pizza finding their footing with what the game was at this point. for example there were combat mechanics but they didn't really get into the final game since going real dang fast ended up being more fun, so the game ended up being based around speedy play. the earlier versions of pizza tower show that wario land 4 inspiration a lot more blatantly and i think thats got a bit of charm to it. while i think the game we ended up getting was better, i can't help but think "hey, what if it came out a year eariler or they kept going into this direction".
besides all of that, i won't go too much into the demo since many folks have done that before me. but i will go into my favourite aspect of the demo...
...this little fella!
this is snick the porcupine! made as a parody of sonic the hedgehog (since this demo was made for sonic's amateur game expo), snick is the character you talk to in-between levels and even get challenged to snick's challenge once you finish all the levels in the demo. snick is also playable if you beat snick's challenge. and playing as snick might be one of the reasons i come back to this demo so much. i've heard people say snick sucks to control (which i admit, he does a bit) but if you get used to it you can get some fun out of playing him. i also just think the guy is such a cute goober. like look into that little dude's eyes! isn't he adorable? snick was my favourite pizza tower character back when i first played this demo and i think that is still the case. heck i even wrote snick lore since he doesn't really have any (well not really wrote, more like the lore is sitting in my brain) so maybe i do still favour the fella a little.
but sadly, snick wouldn't appear as a playable character beyond this point. being a joke character, snick made a minor apperance in the next demo (noise's hardoween), then a cameo in the peppino's xmas break demo and then appeared as a easter egg in the final game. luckily, due to the many modding projects of the pizza tower community, there are many efforts to revive playable snick while also adjusting the character to play well with the final game's much more fast pace design. really rad to see communities bring back scrapped like this, especially since i have such a big interest in cut content.
if this has interested you in giving this old demo a spin, you can still get it! sadly everything else i'm going to talk about are mods based off supporter builds and are such hard to come by nowadays. to my knowledge there are ways to still get these old builds and mods without getting them from shady sources but you might need to go through some sort of process to. best of luck if you wish to find these old mods! speaking of old mods, lets go to our first one!
if you've been in the pizza tower community for a long time, this one is a classic for you! demo 3, mainly developed by mr. unown and starting as a small mod of the old xmas break demo, demo 3 became a mod which used lots of features from the then-new developement builds given to supporters. i was one of them so i got to play d3 and watch it evolve. and i think this mod paved the way for all future pizza tower mods to build off. there were mods before it, but it was one of the first, if not the first to have common features in modern mods such as more playable characters and new levels! although unown stopped working on d3 sometime ago, he is still around in the community working on other projects such as scoutdigo mod and sugary spire.
despite unown moving on from d3 awhile ago, i still think a lot of the mod is still pretty fun! there isn't a whole lot of content but what is here is pretty fun. the time attack mode is fun to try and get tons of laps in and the mod even has a pretty fun playable snick so it gets bonus points from me! i also really enjoy the original levels here, even if there is only 2 of them (and those levels are remixes of pre-existing ones).
i thought before writing this section that i would have more to say about demo 3 but i guess i came up shorter than i thought i would. but what i can say is that i don't think pizza tower modding would exist how it is today if it weren't for it! so thanks demo 3!!
moving on to our next mod, this one isn't as much of a classic, but still well known!
this is frezny worlds! well an old version of it at least. this mod was one cancelled but got revived not too long ago! i'm not too caught up with the mod nowadays but i'm glad to see it back in action! and i suppose it makes this old build even more interesting as we can take a peak into what the mod was orignally like!
the focus of this old version seems to be adding new characters and new levels. espically new levels! we have two floors of them here!!
this version of the mod i have has two whole floors of new levels, with each floor having four levels each! and it even has two bonus levels of sorts in a seprate floor! although back when i first got this mod i never played through all the levels (and to be honest, i still haven't) i have enjoyed what i played. the name of the mod seems to come from how the levels use assets from many different games (such as tiles, locations, and music), like you're exploring different 'worlds'! not sure what the 'frenzy' in the title could mean but i'm sure it does have some meaning XD. anywho, i'm no level design expert or anything but i thought the original levels were pretty fun! i can only think of one out of what i played that might need adjusting, that being the rupture farms level. the usage of the original pre-rendered backgrounds from the game that's being referenced is cool, but also i feel it doesn't work very well as a pizza tower level due to the completely different game designs. but also i guess it doesn't matter too much anymore since the level might not be in the mode anymore...oops!
but even besides the levels and characters, frenzy worlds has something else interesting. a secret i'm not sure many are aware of! so i'll spread it to you! i'm not sure if this is still in the mod now, but if you do have a old build sitting around then feel free to try this. i don't exactly remember who taught me this, but i know it was in a discord vc one day, possibly in the frenzy worlds discord server. you want to walk to the right while on the title screen and try to super jump in a certain spot. i find trying between the i and p in the 'pizza' sign seems to work.
i know this does a bit sound fake and may seem like it, but if you manage to get the right spot (which might take you a couple tries), you'll be taken to a secret room where you can activate a secret joke mode! hope you have fun messing with the secret feature!!
(if you don't have an old build on hand but still wanna see what this is, i've uploaded some footage of it)
...but before you test that out, i have one more thing to talk about!!
scoutdigo is probably the most well known pizza tower mod and the one i've had the most involvement in. not in the sense of working on it but involvement in the community of it. but that aside, scoutdigo is a rad mod! starting as a mod of the old eggplant build and now being rebuilt for the final release, scoutdigo is a general content expansion with the main focus being new levels, a new game mode called death mode and other rad stuff. the old version of scoutdigo is pretty similar but with some stuff that is unique. like the arena mode which is planned to be removed in v2. you fight enemies in waves, collect points to buy perks to upgrade yourself and stay alive for longer. i quite enjoy that mode but i get why i've seen others say it isn't the best. anywho i'm getting slightly off topic because bringing up scoutdigo was mostly for one thing in the mod, which the mod has also become very well known for, and as i said eariler i've had a hand in the community of this mod so i helped contribute to this around the time it happened.
in case you don't know what i'm hinting at, there is a thing in scoutdigo called the keyhunt. on floor 5, if you run into a specific spot on the wall next to the don't make a sound entrance, you'll uncover a secret divot and be taken to a special room with spooky guy in it.
his name is golden pizzaboy (or gpb for short) and talking to him will begin a long complicated quest to collect all of his key pieces. you'll have to run into walls, find secret rooms, find separate secret rooms in levels and you even become super mario to get a key (don't question it)! besides how strange and complicated the key hunt i do enjoy the key hunt! i get a kick out of strange and mysterious parts of games. but you're probably thinking "well how were people able to figure all this stuff out if it was so complicated?" well thats a good question. it was because we all had a big search effort! when the gpb room was first discovered by someone messing with noclip, people instantly started searching for stuff and i started a google doc where people would catalog new findings. people used it to post their theories and communicate with others when they weren't able to use discord
and our excitement was fueled even more when the developers started editing the doc to give us vague hints in character as gpb (which is why the screenshot above mentions 'gp' since thats who the devs credited the messages to). they would also give us lots of silly things we would take as hints. i suppose when your in the theory making mindset you don't really think about if you're having a fast one pulled on you.
there was many ups and downs back when all of this happened, but i don't think i would go back and change anything. the key hunt got me into a community i still frequent and that i met many friends in. i don't think i would be where i am today if it weren't for it. and to see the community live on even after the official scoutdigo discord got shut, then to make a community edition with new features and improvements then start working on a roguelike mod...well its amazing stuff! no community is perfect, and the scoutdigo community isn't as well, but it means a lot to me. i suppose pizza tower means a lot to me in general. and i suppose i usually end these blog posts with some sort of conclusion. so i guess tonight's is that modding is cool, communities are cool and a massive thank you to pizza tower for not only being a rad game, but also getting me where i am right now. happy late second birthday!
anywho, that will be all from me for now! stay silly, stay safe and stay strong folks! until next time!!
(apologies for any mistakes or typos in the post or if this post was paced a bit weird and ended a bit abruptly. i'm just a very tired gal)finished writing 02/02/25 01:03AM (in the words of super mario, imma tired!) | go back to blog directory | go to top