Pizza Tower first saw attention with the demo released in the fan-run Sonic Amateur Game Expo (SAGE) 2018. To coincide with the expo being themed around Sonic the Hedgehog, a temporary joke character named "Snick the Porcupine" was added, with a backstory detailing how Peppino (dressed in blue like Sonic) had intended to go to SAGE, but ended up at the "Snick Amateur Games Expo" and instead made do with Snick's games (Pizza Tower levels). Upon clearing the SAGE demo, Snick will then turn into "Snick.EXE", a parody of the Sonic.EXE creepypasta, starting an exclusive mode called "The Snick Challenge" where Peppino must evade Snick.EXE while playing through all 3 stages in the demo in order. The completion reward is a fully playable Snick with a unique moveset and animations, with taunts referencing a set of YouTube Poop music videos by user iteachvader that were based on the animated series Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Snick would later make a cameo in the SAGE 2020 demo for Antonball Deluxe - a game with connections to Pizza Tower - bringing back the same setting, playable Snick, and The Snick Challenge, but with Snick.EXE instead chasing the player through the regular demo playthrough and the requirement to collect "Ruckus Rubies" to unlock Snick. Since Snick was also not meant to appear in the final release, the Ruckus Rubies use directly-ripped sound effects from the Sonic series.

Despite his removal, Snick still makes many cameos in the final version of Pizza Tower. The tiles for the Slum hub area feature a Missing poster inquiring about Snick's whereabouts, the Refridgerator-Refridgerator-Freezerator stage features a similar Wanted poster on the side of a milk carton, one of Gustavo and Brick's taunts has Brick turn into Snick, and the Pizzaboy's Wash N' Clean area has Snick covered in a freshly-washed blanket, making him appear like a ghost. Peppino's blue outfit also returned under the name "Sage Blue", which can be unlocked by clearing Floor 1 in less than an hour.

According to creator Tony Grayson, possibly in a joking manner, the Anton characters are all multicoloured as a result of a nuclear war that left only Japan and their home country of the Backburner Peninsula, and are not meant to be any real-world enthicity. Grayson jokingly compared the skin colors of the Anton characters to The Groovenians, a 2002 Cartoon Network pilot that was not picked up for a series.

Anton was originally supposed to be an alcoholic in Antonball Deluxe, but the publisher forced the developers to remove that element, and he would drink sodas and floats instead. Anton would be made a drunkard in Antonblast, and the plot of the new game would revolve around rescuing his collection of "spirits".

Anton was originally created as series creator Tony Grayson's profile picture for a forum when he was 9 years old in 2007, under the name "Red Guy". Because the first Antonball was black and white, Red Guy was renamed to Anton. One of the Anton variant characters in Antonball Deluxe is named after Red Guy.

Developers at Summitsphere are known to use Fixed Rilla Roo from Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled as a personal in-joke, referring to anything in an in-development game that is revised, even if it's simply an improvement and not a fix, as "FIXED (blank)". This is most likely the inspiration for Fixed Gold Evil Baby Paul (Shiny)'s name in Antonball Deluxe.

The online mode of Antonball Deluxe was originally called "Antonline", this was changed due to the name already being taken by an online retailer.

The music track "Super Gangston!" in Antonball Deluxe is a highly distorted early version of "Dynamite Man" from Antonblast, which had not been officially revealed at the time of the game's launch.

Paul's walking sound effect in Antonball Deluxe is sampled from CrazyBus, a homebrew game for the Sega Genesis.

Inside the code of Antonball Deluxe are two graphics related to "Big Chungus", a popular screenshot from the 1941 Looney Tunes cartoon "Wabbit Twouble" - one of Big Chungus himself in the Antonball art style, and another depicting Anton with the body proportions of Big Chungus. These sprites were used for a placeholder object that no longer exists in the final game.

Inside the code of Antonball Deluxe is a small, barely-legible image file simply called "hi", depicting former US president Donald Trump riding a Green Shell in a fan-made remake of Super Mario 64. Tony Grayson, the creator of Antonball, posted a high resolution rendition of the image on Twitter a year before the game's launch.

The cover for the vinyl "Super Gangston" in Antonball Deluxe is a heavily edited and compressed rendition of a popular meme image from the 2000s titled "Super Gangsta Mario!", recolored to resemble Anton instead of Mario.