Plants vs. Zombies is a 2009 tower defense video game developed and published by PopCap Games. First released for Windows and Mac OS X, the game has since been ported to consoles, handhelds, and mobile devices. The player takes the role of a homeowner amid a zombie apocalypse. As a horde of zombies approaches along several parallel lanes, the player must defend the home by putting down plants, which fire projectiles at the zombies or otherwise detrimentally affect them. The player collects a currency called sun to buy plants. If a zombie happens to make it to the house on any lane, the player loses and must play through the level again.
Plants vs. Zombies was designed by George Fan, who conceptualized it as a more defense-oriented sequel to his fish simulator game Insaniquarium (2001), then developed it into a tower defense game featuring plants fighting against zombies. The game took inspiration from the games Magic: The Gathering and Warcraft III; along with the movie Swiss Family Robinson. It took three and a half years to make Plants vs. Zombies. Rich Werner was the main artist, Tod Semple programmed the game, and Laura Shigihara composed the game's music. In order to appeal to both casual and hardcore gamers, the tutorial was designed to be simple and spread throughout Plants vs. Zombies.
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Plants vs. Zombies was positively received by critics and was nominated for multiple awards, including "Download Game of the Year" and "Strategy Game of the Year" as part of Golden Joystick Awards 2010. Reviewers praised the game's humorous art style, simplistic but engaging gameplay, and soundtrack. Upon release in May 2009, it was the fastest-selling video game developed by PopCap Games and quickly became their best-selling game, surpassing Bejeweled and Peggle. By 2010, it had sold over a million copies worldwide and has since been considered one of the greatest video games of all time. In 2011, PopCap was bought by Electronic Arts (EA). The company laid off Fan and 49 other employees, marking a change of focus to mobile and social gaming. After the buyout, Plants vs. Zombies was followed by a series of games including two direct sequels, three third-person shooters, and two spin-offs, most of which have received positive reviews.
Plants vs. Zombies is a tower defense video game in which the player defends a house from zombies.[5][6][7] The lawn is divided into a grid,[8] with the player's house to the left.[9] The player places different types of plants on individual squares of the grid. Each plant has a different style of defense, such as shooting, exploding, and blocking.[8][10] Different types of zombies have their own special behaviors and their own weaknesses to different plants.[8][9] For example, Balloon Zombie can float over the player's plants, but its balloon can be popped by Cactus.[8][11] Other examples of zombies include Dancing Zombie which summons Backup Dancers around himself; and the Dolphin Rider Zombie, which rides on a dolphin to jump over a plant.[6][9]
There are five stages in the Adventure mode, each comprising ten levels.[13] At the end of nearly every level, the player collects a new type of plant to use in subsequent levels. On the first level of stage two (level 2-1), zombies begin to occasionally drop in-game money when killed. After level 3-4, the player can spend the money at an in-game store called Crazy Dave's Twiddydinkies.[9][13] Crazy Dave offers boosts that the player uses to upgrade already-placed plants and gardening tools for the player's Zen Garden.[8][9] It is unlocked after level 5-4[13] and allows the player to water and maintain a group of plants,[8] which are obtained as loot from killing zombies or purchasing them through his store;[13] in return, the plants generate money for the player.[8] Every stage's fifth level has a mini-game challenge, often utilizing a conveyor belt that gives various plants to the player.[7] On every stage's tenth level, the player receives plants from a conveyor belt.[13] Stages one, three, and five occur in daylight, while stages two and four take place at night.[13][11]
When the game featured aliens, its working title was Weedlings,[23][27] but Fan thought the name a poor fit because of how many gardening-themed video games were being released at the time.[24] It was renamed Plants vs. Zombies as a placeholder after the enemies were changed.[28] The planned name for most of development was Lawn of the Dead, a pun on the title of the George A. Romero zombie film Dawn of the Dead.[29] Romero did not permit usage of the name, even after a plea from Fan, who sent Romero a video of himself dressed as a Zombie Temp Worker grunting and programming on a computer, subtitled with references to runtime errors.[28][30] There were many other candidate names, including Residential Evil and Bloom & Doom, the latter of which was used as the branding on the in-game seed packets.[28][31]
Plants vs. Zombies was initially designed by Fan alone.[27] Because Fan was a full-time employee at PopCap Games, the video game company helped build up a small team consisting of a composer (Laura Shigihara), a programmer (Tod Semple), and an artist (Rich Werner).[25] Fan was based in San Francisco, while Werner was in Seattle.[29] Stephen Notley is credited as being a writer for Plants vs. Zombies.[13] He wrote the plant and zombie descriptions in the in-game guide, the Suburban Almanac.[3][4] Fan found working in small teams to be easier than working in large teams.[23][27] According to an interview with Edge, while searching for an artist, Fan discovered Rich Werner, whose work Fan thought matched with his design intentions. Fan attributed the design's intrigue to its animation scheme; Tod Semple suggested using Adobe Flash, which Fan worried would generate an animation "cut out from paper" and too closely resembling South Park, but he was ultimately satisfied, crediting Semple and Werner's talent.[20] Plants vs. Zombies was made using PopCap Games's own engine: PopCap Framework.[13] Fan consistently posted updates of Plants vs. Zombies every four months in an internal forum within PopCap Games called Burrito, where he accepted feedback from the employees of PopCap.[23][25]
When the concept of Plants vs. Zombies was first established as a sequel to Insaniquarium, Fan wanted to make a game where the aliens invade the player's garden.[27] Originally, his intent was to make a gardening game where plants are grown as an investment to afford defenses against an alien invasion.[27][23] After Fan created the "perfect zombie", the enemies were changed from aliens to zombies.[26] He trimmed the concept of simultaneously defending and maintaining the garden, feeling that the repetitive gardening detracted from the main gameplay.[27][20] Simplifying the gardening system, Fan restructured the game's main aspects to fit better into the tower defense genre,[27][20] and later added further elements inspired by other games.[25] Fan enjoyed the idea of plants defending against the zombies, combining two distinct species that were not yet touched by other game developers at the time.[27] Plants playing as the role of towers made sense to him, acting as stationary defense against the recurring waves of zombies.[25] Zombies were designed to move in the current linear five- and six-lane system in the final game,[24][25] allowing the enemy zombies to interact with the defensive plants, a refinement in the game that Fan felt worked as a unique gameplay mechanic to make Plants vs. Zombies stand out in the tower defense genre amongst other tower defense games popular at the time.[25]
Plants vs. Zombies took three and a half years to make.[27] Much of the first year of development focused on Adventure mode. Semple began working on ideas later used for Mini-Games mode.[20] Some ideas for the Puzzle mode section were later modified and moved into Adventure mode: "Vasebreaker" and "I, Zombie", for example, came from single-level concepts for Mini-Games mode. During testing, Fan found that the Mini-Games and Puzzle modes detracted from a focus on Adventure mode, so he locked most additional modes, requiring advancement within Adventure mode to unlock them.[20] Later, the development of Plants vs. Zombies consisted of Fan testing the game and writing down notes of what could be done to tweak it before sending them off to Semple.[32] The last year of development had the team fine-tuning Plants vs. Zombies before release.[27]
One of the critical aspects of the development was designing Plants vs. Zombies to be balanced between hardcore and casual gaming.[20][32] Fan designed the tutorial to be simple and merged within the game to attract casual gamers. It had the player learning by performing actions, rather than reading about how to do the actions. The in-game messages were also made to be as short and easy-to-read as possible; with the dialogue from Crazy Dave being broken up into small chunks of text to match this. The in-game messages were also designed to match a player's skill set; an example being the message telling the player to place Peashooters further to the left would only pop up in an early level if a Peashooter was placed towards the right of the lawn and was eaten.[33][34] The team discovered that newcomers to the genre of real-time strategy often had difficulty learning the importance of sun collection. The price of the income-generating Sunflowers was halved, encouraging the player to buy them instead of the attack-only Peashooter. The change forced restructuring of the balance between plants and zombies, a move that Fan said was worth the effort.[25][34]
Plants vs. Zombies has 26 types of zombies.[36] Fan's favorite zombie was Dr. Zomboss; the team spent a full month designing the fight against him at the end of the game.[32] Fan liked the Pole Vaulting Zombie due to the likely amusement of its first encounter with the player; he gave an example of a player failing to block it with a Wall-Nut plant, with the zombie jumping over the obstruction.[25] The Newspaper Zombie's first iteration simply read a newspaper, but Werner redrew the character as having become a zombie while reading on the toilet. Fan's brother asked him whether he based the zombie on their father, as he would often read the newspaper on the toilet. Fan said that while he had no such intention, it was his favorite backstory to a zombie.[29] The Dancing Zombie initially resembled Michael Jackson from the music video "Thriller".[6] The zombie was present in the game before his death, but the entertainer's estate objected to its inclusion over a year following his death; PopCap replaced it with a more generic disco-dancing zombie.[37] Many other zombies were cut during development.[29] 2ff7e9595c
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