From an early age, videogames drove home to me that good food – especially a good turkey dinner – heals your body and your soul. This Thanksgiving, let’s be especially thankful for the turkey in videogames that reminded us to be thankful.
Anyone who’s ever played any ‘80s (and most ‘90s) videogames knows the importance of being grateful for food.
Pac-Man eats delicious, colorful fruit to up his score, but also the very act of eating is his raison d’ette. (Good thing Ms. Pac-Man came along to give him another reason to live). He doesn’t collect trinkets like Mario and Sonic. He eats them, dot by dot – and he eats his antagonists to boot when he gets a power pellet (which are actually supposed to be cookies, according to the creator. Ever had a cookie that made people who antagonize you turn blue and edible? That’d make Thanksgiving dinner with your racist uncle much more interesting, huh?).
CastleVania is actually the quintessential Thanksgiving game. As you undertake your quest to destroy Dracula and his movie-monster underlings, you famously find plates of meat (which could very well be turkey – I don’t know what birds are native to Transylvania) hidden inside breakable blocks of the castle. And man are you thankful when you find it in such a hard game!
CastleVania helped establish the gaming trend of “food found in filthy, random, not-a-dining-room places is essential for health recovery and survival”.
A few years later, Final Fight and then Streets of Rage rewarded you for assaulting garbage cans and wooden crates with your bare hands (instead of just hoodlums, overweight baseball players, and kangaroos) by revealing various food items – one of which is a fully cooked, whole turkey, which restores your entire lifebar. #grateful
Anyone who had a PC for more than Lotus and Wordperfect in 1992 probably played Wolfenstein 3-D, the Nazi-blasting, first first-person shooter. Since the German army didn’t leave as many medipacks lying around as the aliens would in Doom a year later, hero B.J. Blazkowicz mainly heals himself by stuffing his face constantly with plated dinners which suspiciously look like an American Thanksgiving meal. Kind of hilariously, they are everywhere in Castle Wolfenstein. Whether in a dining hall or in a dungeon, I guess Hitler knew the gestapo still had to eat.
These are probably my favorite visual depictions – and uses – of food and turkey dinners in videogames. Now that I have two small kids, playing videogames on Thanksgiving weekend is a little tougher, though my six-year-old is learning the power (and monetary value) of fruit from Animal Crossing. Now if I can only get her to eat it for real!
I hope you have a fun, wonderful holiday week with friends and family!