Plants vs. Zombies - On This Day

There are some crazy plot twists in the games and the tower defense type of game Plants Vs. Zombies had one of the best. Zombies are coming to eat your brains and so you have to plant an army of plants in your garden to prevent undead opponents from rushing off the road.

Plants become available when you collect enough solar energy generated by sunflowers and individual mushrooms, and they are planted in a field that has a total of 45 fields. Some "units" of plants have long-range or one-time attacks, and their task is to stop the zombies from reaching the left end of the screen, ie the entrance to your house.

Creator Plants Vs. The zombies were George Fan from the PopCap Games studio, who came up with the idea by playing mods for Warcraft 3. The basic idea behind this game had already been put together in his previous title Insaniquarium, only here he opted for defensive gameplay.

Interestingly, zombies were not the first choice of opponents for this game - initially, they were aliens, but the creator thought that plants and zombies were a better combination. The game was even supposed to be called Lawn of the Dead, as a kind of parody of the cult horror film, but director George A. Romero did not approve of the use of that name.

Plants Vs. Zombies attracted players with its simple gameplay mechanics, but also with its charming humor. Zombies thus left semi-literate messages between missions, a crazy neighbor was selling seedlings in his van, and all this was accompanied by very addictive music.

The game was launched on PC and Mac platforms and quickly became a hit. It sold so fast that it surpassed other PopCap games, including the hits Bejeweled and Peggle. The arrival of the game on consoles enhanced that success, and the biggest growth in players were caused by switching the game to mobile platforms. According to data from 2016, Plants vs. Zombies have been downloaded more than nine million times on the iOS platform alone. Not surprisingly, the PopCap Games development team then became the target of Electronic Arts, which bought them in 2011.

Unfortunately for PC players, this was the first and last classic Plants vs. Zombies on that platform. Later, Plants vs. Zombies 2 appeared on mobile platforms as well as the third party. On PC and consoles, we got a spin-off of Garden Warfare and Battle for Neighborville.