Top 5 Reasons Why There Aren’t Any Good Thanksgiving Games

Lists take a long time to work and are hard to get approved. Once we get the green light from the overheads, we get the privilege of bringing you some quality journalism in a numbered format. They are totally not for filling space in during the holidays when we are out of the office. We have made a list of great scary games for Halloween and holiday-adjacent games for the winter holidays. But Thanksgiving has us dumbstruck because there are no good Turkey Day games. But that has not plugged our list-making efforts because we can make a list about anything, even if it is a list about why we can’t make a list. Here’s are the best reasons of why there aren’t any good Thanksgiving games.

5. Halloween and Christmas are better
Halloween is built on horror, which opens the door up for gaming staples like zombies and other scary monsters. Batman dropped a dude on a Christmas tree from a building in Arkham Origins and that guy would have died if the decorated fir tree didn’t break his fall. Thanksgiving has nothing because it is overshadowed by the two better holidays with more blatant ties to games. Besides, how would you gamify arguing or any other Thanksgiving and Black Friday tradition? Press X to not bring up politics at the table! Mash Y to avoid getting concussed by an angry mom at Best Buy! Waggle to massage your uncle! Frankly, the whole thing sounds like it would be a cheap, quick-time event piece of shovelware and we already have enough of that on the Wii.

4. Blizzard didn’t make a Thanksgiving Event for Overwatch
If Blizzard does not find a holiday worthy enough to make an event, then it is not a rad enough holiday for games, period. And let’s face it, the event-specific skins would suck. We would all rather see Solider 76 dressed up like Michael Jackson in Thriller than a boring, buckle-headed pilgrim. That would probably make people actively not buy loot boxes.

3. Call of Duty hasn’t had a Thanksgiving game yet
Infinite Warfare literally took Call of Duty as far as it could when it went to space – the final frontier. So what’s the next logical step? The final final frontier: Plymouth Rock circa 1621. The series is running out of time periods and places for Call of Duty so they’ll probably end up at the first Turkey Day at some point. And when they do, they can single-handedly define this holiday and finally annualize Thanksgiving.

2. Nathan Drake doesn’t like ham
“Ham sucks and is the candy corn of meat. It’s completely upstaged by the traditional Thanksgiving turkey and is really only there in case all the other food spontaneously spoils as you set it on the table.” Nathan Drake actually said this – and much more – about Thanksgiving in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, if you know how to find it. If you hold down R1 and L4 for 16 minutes after the fourth firefight on level three on a Tuesday, you get access to Nathan Drake’s secret feelings on Thanksgiving’s worst meat and Thanksgiving as a whole. Drake makes a poignant point explaining why ham sucks and why Thanksgiving just doesn’t work for video games in only a few sentences.

1. Thanksgiving just sorta sucks
Why would anyone even choose to make a Thanksgiving game over all the other cool holidays out there? A Thanksgiving game would mean they forgot about all the better holidays. Double Fine chose Arbor Day for their cult-classic Psychonauts, and I’m fairly certain the first Mortal Kombat takes place on my birthday. Developers seem to know what holidays to pick if they want to center their game on one and it makes sense why they wouldn’t choose Thanksgiving. It literally does everything worse than every other holiday. I also heard Thanksgiving doesn’t playtest well.