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 their 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 the level.
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.
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 the 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 multimedia franchise including two direct sequels, three third-person shooters, two comic book series, and two spin-off games, most of which have received positive reviews.
Gameplay[]
Plants vs. Zombies is a tower defense video game in which the player defends their suburban home from zombies. The lawn is divided into a grid, with the player's house to the left. 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. Different types of zombies have their own special behaviors and their own weaknesses to different plants. For example, Balloon Zombie can float over the player's plants, but its balloon can be popped by Cactus. Other examples of zombies include Dancing Zombie which summons Backup Dancers around himself; and the Dolphin Rider Zombie, which rides on a dolphin in the water to jump over a plant.
The player can pick a limited number of types of plants through seed packets at the beginning of each level, and must pay to place them using a currency called "sun". The player collects sun by either clicking on sun icons that randomly appear over the lawn, or by using certain plants that generate sun, like Sunflowers and Sun-shrooms. Each type of plant recharges between each placement at various speeds. A shovel can be used to dig up and remove plants. Positioned at the left end of each lane is a single-use lawnmower, pool cleaner, and roof cleaner; if a zombie reaches this end, these will activate and kill all zombies in that lane. If a zombie reaches the end of a lane whose mower, pool cleaner, and roof cleaner has already been used, roof cleaners were crushed by Dr. Zomboss' fireball and iceball in level 5-10 and Dr. Zomboss's Revenge, and a roof cleaner has not yet bought, the player loses the level which results in removing the progress of that level's attempt by leaving with the only options to restart and exit.
Adventure mode[]
There are five stages in the Adventure mode, each comprising ten levels. 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. Crazy Dave offers boosts that the player uses to upgrade already-placed plants and gardening tools for the player's Zen Garden, which is unlocked after level 5-4 and allows the player to water and maintain a group of plants, which are obtained as loot from killing zombies or purchasing them through his store; in return, the plants generate money for the player. Every stage's fifth level has a mini-game challenge, often utilizing a conveyor belt that gives various plants to the player. On every stage's tenth level, the player receives plants from a conveyor belt. Stages one, three, and the first nine levels of stage five occur in daylight, while stages two, four, and the battle with Dr. Zomboss take place at night.
During the nighttime stages, the player uses the lower-cost fungi plants due to the lack of natural sun generation at night. Stages three and four take place in the house's backyard, which has six lanes (unlike the usual five lanes) and features a pool taking up the middle two lanes. On the pool, plants are placed on top of Lily Pads which, unlike most plants, can be placed directly on pool lanes. Stage four has fog that obscures most of the lawn. Stage five takes place on the house's roof. This setting has the player use catapult plants, instead of the standard shooting plants, to account for the roof's upward slope.
Adventure mode's last level pits the player against Dr. Zomboss, an evil scientist and the zombies' animator. He crushes the player's plants by having his Zombot crush the plants or throw vans at them, and can place fire and ice balls that roll across a lane. The player subdue these balls with Jalapeños and Ice-shrooms. After completing the Adventure mode, the player can play it again, this time with plants unlocked during the previous play-through, and with three randomly selected plants to begin each level.
Other game modes[]
Three additional modes—Mini-Games, Puzzle, and Survival—become available once Adventure mode is completed. In Mini-Games mode, the player selects from a collection of twenty mini-games. These levels pose the player with unique challenges, each using some gimmick—often variants of a conveyor belt that gives the player certain plants. In Puzzle mode, the player selects from two types of levels: "Vasebreaker" and "I, Zombie". In "Vasebreaker", the player breaks open a set of vases, each containing a plant or a zombie. The level ends when all the vases are smashed and all the zombies are killed. In "I, Zombie", the player places zombies to get past pre-placed cardboard cut-outs of plants, aiming to eat the brain at the end of each lane. The player loses and force to restart the puzzle if there are no zombies present in the lawn and not all five brains were eaten while having less than 50 sun (or for the case of its endless version, starting the next streak with sun count below 50). Survival mode offers a selection of levels in which the player chooses plants to defeat increasingly challenging waves of zombies.
Development[]
Plants vs. Zombies was designed by George Fan. Imagining a more defense-oriented version of one of his previous titles, Insaniquarium (2001), and having played some Warcraft III tower defense mods, he was inspired to make a tower defense game. Fan considered a sequel to Insaniquarium for the Nintendo DS, each screen would represent a separate fish tank—one on top of the other. Aliens would attack the top fish tank and, if successful, would break into the bottom fish tank. Gameplay in the top tank would focus on defense against the aliens, while in the bottom tank it would revolve around resource generation, akin to Insaniquarium. But inspired by Warcraft III's towers, he felt that plants would make good defensive structures. He wanted to bring new concepts to the genre and believed the fact that enemies in tower defense games would never attack the towers was unintuitive. To address this, he began designing the five- and six-lane setups that would later be used in the final game. Enemies were at first the aliens from Insaniquarium, but while Fan was sketching concept art, he drew what he considered "the perfect zombie", and the theming was reworked. Fan went with using zombies instead of aliens in order to make the game stand out from other video games using plants.
Insaniquarium substantially influenced the development of Plants vs. Zombies. The games have similar pacing, determined by the "drip-feeding" of pets and plants respectively, and choosing plants at the beginning of each Plants vs. Zombies level is analogous to choosing pets in Insaniquarium. Fan also took inspiration from the film Swiss Family Robinson, in which a family defends themselves and their home against pirates. Fan included elements from the trading card game Magic: The Gathering, which he had played with his girlfriend, Laura Shigihara. Showing her how to customize their card decks inspired him to design Plants vs. Zombies with seed packets—instead of his original idea of a conveyor belt that gave random plants—due to the seed packet system's greater complexity. While the conveyor belt was dropped from the more common game mode, it remained a special element in select levels. The use of multitasking between lanes was influenced by and was featured prominently in the old arcade game Tapper.
When the game featured aliens, its working title was Weedlings, but Fan thought the name a poor fit because of how many gardening-themed video games were being released at the time. It was renamed Plants vs. Zombies as a placeholder after the enemies were changed. 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. 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. 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.
Design[]
Plants vs. Zombies was initially designed by Fan alone. 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). Fan was based in San Francisco, while Werner was in Seattle. Stephen Notley is credited as being a writer for Plants vs. Zombies. He wrote the plant and zombie descriptions in the in-game guide, the Suburban Almanac. Fan found working in small teams to be easier than working in large teams. 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. Plants vs. Zombies was made using PopCap Games's own engine: PopCap Framework. 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.
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. Originally, his intent was to make a gardening game where plants are grown as an investment to afford defenses against an alien invasion. After Fan created the "perfect zombie", the enemies were changed from aliens to zombies. He trimmed the concept of simultaneously defending and maintaining the garden, feeling that the repetitive gardening detracted from the main gameplay. Simplifying the gardening system, Fan restructured the game's main aspects to fit better into the tower defense genre, and later added further elements inspired by other games. 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. Plants playing as the role of towers made sense to him, acting as stationary defense against the recurring waves of zombies. Zombies were designed to move in the current linear five- and six-lane system in the final game, 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.
Plants vs. Zombies took three and a half years to make. Much of the first year of development focused on Adventure mode; Semple afterward suggested brainstorming concepts for Mini-Games mode. "Vasebreaker" and "I, Zombie" originated from those ideas as individual levels before Fan, who enjoyed tweaking them, separated them and their variants into Puzzle mode. During testing, Fan found that the additional modes detracted players from Adventure mode. Fan locked most of their levels, requiring advancement within Adventure mode to unlock them. 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. The last year of development had the team fine-tuning Plants vs. Zombies before release.
One of the critical aspects of the development was designing Plants vs. Zombies to be balanced between hardcore and casual gaming. 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. 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.
Characters[]
Early in the development of Plants vs. Zombies, time was spent brainstorming ideas for characters. Fan purposely gave all the plants and zombies names that matched their individual functions, designing them accordingly—for example, a Peashooter shoots pea projectiles. Fan also made all the plants stationary and all the zombies slowly move across their lane so the casual player would understand that the towers (the rooted plants) could not move and the attackers (the mindless zombies) could slowly move. The final designs of the zombies and plants changed little from their inception. The game's sole human character, Crazy Dave, was a parody of David Rohrl, a person Fan knew. Crazy Dave features a vocal performance by Fan.
The final game has 49 types of plants. Fan expressed fondness for the Tall-Nut, Torchwood, and Cob Cannon plants. He liked the Tall-Nut's character, citing its "determined gaze" and its shedding a single tear when hurt. In terms of strategy, he liked that the Torchwood—which gives Peashooters flaming ammunition—required the player to consider how plants interact with each other. Fan also liked the Squash, due to its name's wordplay; the plant crushes zombies. A proposed plant would have been placed above other plants to protect them from Bungee and Catapult Zombies; it was difficult, however, to visualize this plant's position. A similar defensive item (the Umbrella Leaf) made it into the final game, protecting plants from Bungee and Catapult Zombies, but placed next to plants. Many potential plants had concept art but were not in the final Plants vs. Zombies.
Plants vs. Zombies has 26 types of zombies. Fan's favorite zombie was Dr. Zomboss; the team spent a full month designing the fight against him at the end of the game. 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. 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. The Dancing Zombie initially resembled Michael Jackson from the music video for "Thriller". 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. Many other zombies were cut during development.
Soundtrack[]
Shigihara composed Plants vs. Zombies's soundtrack, borrowing elements from pop music and console chiptune. Before the game's inception, Fan asked Shigihara to compose the music for his next title because he admired her music. She drew influence from Danny Elfman's soundtracks and a wide range of musical styles: One song uses marching band percussion and swing; another utilizes techno beats with "organic" sounds. Film music scholar K. J. Donnelly found the music to be bright and "cartoonish". He noted the music was not dynamically tied to gameplay, but instead progresses independently. He noted the soundtrack's design in a progressive style, "almost in parallel to the unfolding of the gameplay".
Shigihara described the music as "macabre, yet goofy". Examining the night stages, she explained that she used a combination of big band swing beats with "several haunting and serious melodies". The songs "Loonboon" and "Brainiac Maniac" were written towards the end of production. Shigihara said these were reactionary songs she wrote to fit the game's feel after playing it through twice. Shigihara composed and performed the music video shown during the game's credits, titled "Zombies on Your Lawn". The song was inspired by "Still Alive", which played at the end of the video game, Portal. Plants vs. Zombies's tracks were eventually released as part of a downloadable soundtrack album.
Reception[]
Plants Vs. Zombies has been very successful, receiving high ratings, award nominations, and awards.
Awards[]
Plants vs. Zombies has been nominated for the "Casual Game of the Year" and "Outstanding Achievement in Game Design" Interactive Achievement Awards from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. The game received nominations in "Best Game Design", "Innovation", and "Best Download Game" for the Game Developers Choice Awards. Plants vs Zombies was picked by Gamezebo as one of the 'Best Games of 2009'.
Sales[]
To date, Plants vs. Zombies is the fastest-selling video game developed by PopCap Games.
Other[]
A Plants Vs. Zombies Board Game has been released, Plants Vs. Zombies Lottery Tickets, and an appearance in a TV Show and a similar version in World of Warcraft.