Good Pizza, Great Pizza, The Cozy Pizza-Flipping Business Sim

Become the best Ovenist in town!

Be The Boss Of Your Own Pizzeria

Pizza Time, All Day, Everyday!

Business management simulators have this preconceived notion of being stressful and too serious, but Good Pizza, Great Pizza is determined to show a different side of business management with their cozy pizza shop-themed story-driven cooking game!

Moving into a whole new city, you decide to put up your own pizza shop. As the CEO, founder, cashier, interior designer, and pizza chef all in one (yes, you’re the sole employee), you will do your best to make your pizza joint the best spot in town. Whip up pizzas according to the customer’s strange preferences while also managing your ingredient stock and make enough money to keep your business running.

As your pizza place becomes more popular, the storyline will also advance, bringing in not only new toppings, decor, and kitchen equipment to upgrade your whole establishment but also new customers and new rivals to go against! With five different chapters and five different rivals to beat along with dozens of side stories, there is no shortage of content in this pizzeria mania.

Hundreds Of Customers, Hundreds Of Decorations

There really is no shortage of content to discover in this game. According to the game’s Steam page, there’s over 300 unique customers to meet, each with a number of their own personalized pizza orders, totaling to a massive 1 million! Literally, not one pizza order is exactly the same with tens of thousands of different combinations.

Aside from the variety of pizza orders, there are also over 800 different types of decorations available for you to choose from, freely letting you customize your pizzeria just the way you want to. This number may have increased in number as well, as Good Pizza, Great Pizza (GPGP) also launches bi-monthly seasonal events, each with their own custom decoration set.

How A Dream Turned Into A Pizzaria-lity

Indie game development studio TapBlaze is a Los Angeles-based company created in 2012 that focuses on mobile games. Their library now boasts over 30 games on mobile, with the mission to “create memorable entertainment experiences for players around the world.” Founded by CEO Anthony Lai, he always had dreams of making games, but it seemed impossible to do so back then. He went ahead and started a career in the electrical engineering industry after graduating from university. Then, in 2012, when the iPhone was launched and the App Store was born, Lai then jumped into the fray to make his long time dream a reality.

He began first with simple sandbox games as a solo developer, which did garner some attention, resulting in a few million downloads. However, he was met with a roadblock—he found that making mobile games “was harder than he thought.” Lai shared to AppLovin that “Two years down the road, I saw that the market was changing. You got more of the big game studios taking mobile more seriously and players became more sophisticated with higher expectations.”

Making games is not cheap, and for him to further his game developing dream, the game also needed to be profitable. Sandbox games were clearly not sustainable, and so Lai hired a team of programmers and artists to then create games with more substance.

The Answer Is Pizza!

Lai knew he wanted a food-themed game to produce, but the question is, what food exactly? He first considered sweet desserts like cake and doughnuts, but was quickly scrapped out. But having grown up in Queens, New York, he realized (with the help of his brothers) that there was one food that people from all cultures and all walks of life, young and old, would enjoy no matter what—pizza! “One of his fondest childhood memories was going to a by-the-slice pizza shop and visiting the arcade store in his neighborhood, which later became an inspiration for the general “hole in the wall” neighborhood pizzeria mood of Good Pizza, Great Pizza,” Yuni Cho, TapBlaze’s community marketing manager, shared to Game Developer in an interview in June 2024.

Lai and the team then got to work, first putting out My Pizza Shop and its sequel My Pizza Shop 2 before settling with Good Pizza, Great Pizza in 2014. The appeal and the player base was strong at first, but Lai saw that players quickly dropped it, leaving it with a low retention rate. This was the reason why it was abandoned for the next two years in favor of the match-3 game that came after GPGP, named Gummy Gush.

Gummy Gush was the game that Lai and TapBlaze presented in the Game Developers Conference (GDC) back in 2016, but while pitching Gummy Gush, other developers and game industry staff found more potential in GPGP instead. “I met an editor at one of the app stores but he wasn’t really interested in match-three. He saw that we had Good Pizza and thought it was a cool concept. He told us we didn’t do a good job of polishing up the game’s design, UI, and monetization,” Lai shared. With that feedback fresh in their mind, Lai returned to Los Angeles with a whole new outlook—Good Pizza, Great Pizza, revamped edition. And the rest is history, as they say.

A Good Pizza Game By A Pizza Employee

At present, GPGP boasts thousands of daily average users. After all, even after a decade since its initial release, the game receives frequent events and updates, as well as a compelling story, a detailed world, and a quirky art style. It also boasts a sneak peek into how real-life pizzerias may run, as their lead designer was working at Costco Pizza for four years, ultimately influencing the overall feeling of the game. It was a blessing not only for TapBlaze, but for the artist-designer as well. “The original artist worked at Costco Pizza and dreamed of becoming a game artist. But due to his lack of experience, no one had given him a chance. As a new game startup, TapBlaze saw the artist’s potential and considered his pizza-making experience as a bonus for the company,” Lai said.

Keeping the realism was important in the making of the game, with the orders closely mimicking real pizza flavors such as Meat Lovers and Supreme and even the customers reminiscent of the different types of people the team meet in their daily lives. And the best part is that the game is rated highly by actual pizza shop employees! “Through the game reviews from actual pizza shop employees, we seemed to have really nailed the realism of the customers in particular. Many would write us an app review on how much of a hoot they got out of some outrageous but very realistic customer requests, like no cheese or sauce on a pizza order,” Cho added.

Pizza Master—Uh, Ovenist In The Making

Good Pizza, Great Pizza is a great blend of all that’s fun in a simulation game. An interesting story, fun and interactive pizza-making gameplay, and appropriate rewards to keep players motivated—the game’s structure has something for everyone. The visuals are cartoony but adorable with a pastel-like color palette, which make it easy for the eyes for all ages. The soundtrack is fitting as well, definitely the type of tunes you will hear in a pizza place in real life, with the Italian-European flair.

If you like the idea of starting your own pizzeria in a game for a low, low price, Good Pizza, Great Pizza is a wonderful game to start off with. Despite the business management aspect, it’s casual enough to not be overbearing. Definitely a must try!

Initially released for iOS in December of 2014 followed by an Android release months later in February 2015 and a Nintendo Switch release as well, the beloved pizza simulator game is now available to play on PC and macOS through Steam, launched just last year in 2023. The Steam and Nintendo Switch versions cost $9.99 USD, while the mobile versions are free but with in-app purchases and optional ads.