Yo! Noid NES - Half A Million Copies Shipped And Domino's Took A Royalty On Every Single One

Yo! Noid is one of the weirdest pieces of Nintendo history I have brought to Game Forest GF and the backstory here genuinely gets stranger the deeper you dig. It released in North America in November 1990, developed by Now Production and published by Capcom, built around Domino's Pizza's mascot character.

Here is the twist almost nobody knows. Yo! Noid was not built from scratch as an original Domino's game. It started life in Japan as Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru, released there in March 1990, running on the same engine as Namco's Wagyan Land series. Capcom simply swapped the ninja protagonist's graphics, sound and presentation for Domino's mascot while keeping every single gameplay mechanic completely untouched. The plot has the Noid clearing his name after an evil green doppelganger named Mr. Green starts terrorizing New York City and everyone assumes it is the real Noid causing the chaos. Armed with a yo-yo as his primary weapon, the Noid sets out to save the city and clear his reputation.

Domino's director of marketing Norm Nickin told Advertising Age that the company took a royalty cut on every wholesale copy sold, and roughly half a million copies of Yo! Noid shipped to stores at a $40 retail price. The instruction manual even included an actual one dollar off coupon for a Domino's order printed on its final page, making this one of the more blatant pieces of in-box advertising in NES history despite Nickin's public claim that the Domino's branding would be kept subtle.

The Noid character itself has one of the strangest real world footnotes of any video game mascot. In January 1989, a man named Kenneth Lamar Noid, who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia, became convinced the entire Avoid The Noid ad campaign had been built specifically to mock him personally, leading to a real hostage situation at a Domino's location in Georgia. Domino's rebranded the character through the friendlier Yo Domino's campaign afterward, which is the softer, kid-racing version of the Noid you see represented in this very NES game.

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