Gun Metal Gaming Chapter 3: Second Acts in Gaming Lives

In “Gun Metal Gaming: A 2009 Retrospective,” Wolfman Jew covers one game from 2009 a month for all of 2024. Each is one he’s either never played or played for only a few forgotten minutes well over a decade ago; he’s coming into these about as fresh as a player can. Hopefully, his experiences will give us a good view of one of gaming’s lesser years.

“There’s a zombie on your lawn

“We don’t want zombies on the lawn…”—”Zombies on Your Lawn,” Plants vs. Zombies

Relatively early into the planning for what became “Gun Metal Gaming,” I committed to covering a mobile game. 2009 is around the point when playing on the phone really began to take off. It’s the beginning of the “mobile market” as we know it today, this wasteland of cheap knockoffs, live service monstrosities, and abrasive in-game ads. The development of that horrific marketplace was one of the main things that brought us from the Aughts into the Tens. The thing is that it wasn’t all bad back then (and I’m sure there are still clever new games being made for iPhone and Android; they’re just hidden). That very year had the charming Angry Birds, and later stuff like Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja, and The Room proved smartphones could be a space of innovative, tactile fun distinct from dedicated handhelds. If we want to talk about 2009 as the end of one kind of era and the beginning of another, we cannot ignore what has become the most significant, widespread, and lucrative market in the industry.

Image: Fireproof Studios, via Flickr. The Room turns the touchscreen into a tool of investigation as you poke and prod an ever-expanding puzzle box. I greatly enjoyed the Nintendo Switch remaster, which is slightly more awkward with its motion controls but still a delightful puzzle game.

Of course, had I looked at the Wikipedia article for Plants vs. Zombies for just a couple seconds longer than I did when checking initial release dates, I’d have learned that the iOS port I had intended to play was made in 2010, almost a full year after its initial browser release, and has also been delisted from the mobile market. And thanks to Apple’s discontinued support for 32-bit applications, the 2009 original for Steam is unplayable on my MacOS! Oops. There is an EA app version for Mac, but… do I want to sign up for that?

But let’s stay with the game—albeit through its 2010 Xbox 360 port, which is thankfully backwards compatible and faithful—and not just because I went out of my way to include it from the start. Or, to be blunt, because the only mobile game of 2009 that people really care about is Angry Birds, which I have already played exhaustively. Plants vs. Zombies is a pivotal part of this era. It was the magnum opus of PopCap Games, a giant of the Aughts that produced casual classics like Bejeweled, Peggle, and Feeding Frenzy, and it is no less devoted to that ideal of “pick up and play.” But it’s also a nail-biting strategy game with an iconic, era-appropriate art style and a genre near its creative peak. Plus, it broke out on mobile in a way that would for better and worse define PopCap’s direction. You could call it tower defense at its peak, a game that took us directly from free browser silliness to horrible smartphone silliness, and a very specific kind of crossover hit we don’t see much of these days.

Image: Source Gaming. The title screen of Plants vs. Zombies. My meticulous, obsessive play style means that this is one of the few screenshots in which the zombies aren’t all bunched up near the back.

It’s also, I gotta say, great. PvZ is an absolute delight. There is a reason this is the king of the tower defense genre. Every victory feels great, the gameplay loop of building and spending resources is excellent, and it has a sumptuous “game feel.” From its most basic core gameplay to the charming score and sound effects, it is excellent. To be honest, it might be giving Bayonetta a challenge for my favorite game of 2009—which was always part of the point, to introduce me to a year that felt alien. Plants vs. Zombies is the best game I’ve played for “Gun Metal Gaming” so far, and while I’m sure I’ll find at least a few more gems, it’ll be hard for any of the next nine games to top it.

While the graphics put it closer to a cheap Adult Swim pilot than a genre based around tight resource management and traffic control, and the grid structure lacks those long, defensible lanes, the game is firmly tower defense and at its seemingly most addicting. The suburban house is on the left side, the zombies on the right, and with your coterie of plants at the ready, never the twain shall meet. New plant and zombie types are added at a drip feed, alongside a difficulty curve that goes up a notch at a time but always feels good. Fighting at night is largely more unpleasant, mostly thanks to a fog of war mechanic, but it also adds a wildly unique squad of nocturnal mushrooms (that can adapt to daylight with a coffee bean plant. The game always finds ways for you to get more out of your tools). Levels with a backyard pool necessitate unique aquatic plants—and lilypads for everything else. Going to the steep rooftop forces you to first set up ceramic pots, then to deal with the incline with cabbage catapults. Each venue demands new strategies, but all are built on the satisfying fundamentals, and they all fit within this wacky setting. It is truly impeccable at its mesh of style, pace, and mechanics.

Image: Source Gaming. Early goings in a typical PvZ level. You start by putting down barely any Sunflowers and the occasional Peashooter. As the Sunflowers generate more and more sunlight, you get the opportunity to build more and greater defenses… right as the zombies start coming out in higher numbers.

One of Plants vs. Zombies’ best virtues is the way the types are balanced. Every plant costs a certain amount of “sunlight” generated by a Sunflower, so you start matches by plopping up a bunch of those, then slowly transition into putting down weak, then stronger offensive plants. But the weaker plants never feel valueless or outdone as each level goes on. In fact, there are plenty of times where they feel more useful even by the end. It helps that there are only a few plants that are simply better, more costly versions of other plants. Most of the time, the pricier ones feature unique mechanics, like a Piranha Plant-esque fly trap that can eat a zombie whole but takes so long to chew that it’s easy pickings for the next corpse. A few are less fun, mostly the ones that just exist to counter a specific zombie, but they’re all charming in their own way. Naturally, the zombies get plenty of love, too; my favorite of them is the gymnast who uses a pole vault to jump over precisely one of your obstacles.

Image: Source Gaming. This screen door-carrying zombie is immune to pellets, the main attack by your plants. Whether in a normal match or this gimmicky mini-game, it can only be felled by the carnivorous plants, the crushing pear, or this spraying mushroom.

Fitting for a game that draws strength from its smallness, the bulk of it came from a four-person team: designer George Fan, programmer Tod Semple, artist Rich Werner, and composer Laura Shigihara. Fan, a Blizzard programmer working in PopCap Games’ empire of addictive casual puzzlers, was workshopping a sequel to his fish-raising strategy game Insaniquarium. He was interested in exploring tower defense gameplay inspired by Warcraft III and—wanting the normally safe towers to be actively threatened—looked at Tapper from 1984 to create a gridlike matrix of lanes through which enemies would flow. Cartoony plants made sense as immovable defenses; zombies (which were at the height of their pop cultural clout but rare in casual and gardening games) are slow enough to give you time to set up. He and Shigihara playing Magic: The Gathering led to the “seed packet” system, where you pick the plants you’ll use before matches. With the sequel idea fully scrapped by this point, the game continued through its three and a half year cycle as mechanics like gardening and a conveyor belt of random plants were pruned or reworked as bonus modes. This is important, because Fan et al seem to have had the best of both worlds. They had the support to tinker with a game for years, but as a small team that never lost sight of the gameplay. It may have been PopCap’s most expensive game at the time, but in a year already suffering the weight of obscenely-sized monoliths like Skull and Bones and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, something this small and focused sounds great today.

Image: Source Gaming. A pivotal moment during production was when the price of Sunflowers, which generate your currency, was slashed. Players would ignore it for basic attacking plants during testing; cutting the price made it more encouraging to buy first.

Plants vs. Zombies does have several other mini-games of positive to somewhat mixed quality. Many were made by Semple midway through production and added to the game’s robust suite of bonus modes. The prominent bowling one where you chuck a “Wall-Nut” (a giant nut that normally holds zombies off long enough to build attacking units) at enemies isn’t particularly satisfying, but others are much better: one where you play as the zombies, one where you have to pick enemies and plants at random, even a crazy slot machine. They and others, like a Bejeweled clone you play during a match, show a game so confident in its formula that it’s comfortable experimenting. None of these are game-changers, and they don’t need to be. They’re just spins on a formula that has not aged a day.

Image: Source Gaming. Perhaps the cleverest mini-game in Plants vs. Zombies is “I, Zombie,” where you turn the tables and play as the zombies. Instead of a time limit, you have a tight currency limit and have to decide which zombies best counter each lane’s selection of plants.

Stylistically, though, the game is certainly of its time, perhaps best seen through the comedy stylings of Crazy Dave. Your all-in-one tutor / shop is a kind of character that was all the rage back then: vaguely random, wacky, and ugly in that sorta… “someone on Newgrounds thinking they’re doing Homestar Runner meets South Park” way. He’s not actually bad like that might suggest—though he’s aggressively unfunny—but him, the ugly-cute plants, and the generally Hot Topic-friendly aesthetic are extremely 2000’s in a way that’s hard to fully articulate. The Michael Jackson zombie, who very quickly became “the Disco Stu zombie” after the Jackson estate objected. The almost Invader Zim-y art style. Shigihara’s wacky song over the end credits, directly inspired by the paradigm-shattering “Still Alive” from Portal. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine Plants vs. Zombies releasing after 2009, though it carries the look handsomely.

Image: Source Gaming. The indelible (and kinda tiring) Crazy Dave.

And there is a reason why the apex of tower defense should feel so tied to that decade. Because while there are examples of the genre as early as half a century ago, tower defense as we know it was built in the era of Adobe Flash. The mid- to late-Aughts were a boom for free browser games and people with the inclination to make them. Many were not necessarily good, or morally decent, and almost all have either died in the wake of Flash’s discontinuation or are dependent on emulators like Ruffle. But this was the first period in our medium’s history where the tools for game making were really, really close to the floor, as were the tools to play them—namely any computer with online access, something many libraries or schools could provide. A lot of people took advantage of that on both ends, including me spending high school free periods enjoying Stinkoman 20X6. And, for whatever reason, many of the creators decided to make tower defense games. Flash Element Tower Defense and Gemcraft were at the crest of a wave that was very large… if you knew where to look. But they became far more ubiquitous once Apple’s App Store opened; many were ported right in, some even still using Flash. In that sense, PvZ can be seen as a culmination of the genre, not just the culmination of its company.

Having a history built on such a dated software suite (one Plants vs. Zombies itself used, albeit only for a demo on PopCap’s website) is just one thing that makes tower defense a deeply odd genre. It’s ubiquitous enough that many gamers have probably experienced it in some way, but it doesn’t really have a deep “bench” of iconic series. Mostly it’s PvZ, GemCraft, Orcs Must Die, Kingdom Rush, Defense Grid… a respectable list of games, but pretty “minor” all things considered. And while the genre has evolved since its Flash heyday, many of those evolutions primarily involved putting it into another genre, like shooters or RPGs, rather than reimagining the genre itself in the way this one did. And although plenty of these are respectable and get nice ports to Steam and console, a lot… aren’t. Most encapsulate the worst tropes of mobile gaming: microtransactions, pay to win, and constant in-game ads. Tower defense managed a somewhat unfortunate second act in its life, going from cheap and dirty in the Flash way to cheap and dirty in the mobile way. And that leads into the sad part of this story, best encapsulated by the other game I played for this article: Plants vs. Zombies… for iPhone.

Image: Source Gaming. Plants vs. Zombies does fine with the iPhone’s thin aspect ratio, though I do miss the wider backgrounds. This port is deeply depressing, but the core at least works perfectly.

See, the Plants vs. Zombies that I emulated on my Series X is as close as you could get to the original release, the one on Steam. But neither are the culturally dominant version. That would be this free to play mobile edition from 2017, and while it is mechanically identical, god, Plants vs. Zombies FREE is depressing. It’s far from unplayable and no less addicting—tower defense is a natural fit for touchscreens—but the ads are relentless. There’s one after every level, they’re long, and they’re all for games that look like scams. You can also opt in to watch even more horrible ads to get access to the one-off rakes, extra seed slots, or explosive Wall-Nuts from the game’s bonus modes, turning “pay to win” into “watch to win.” Yet this is the default image of the game by this point, having so thoroughly displaced the original in space and accessibility (literally; it replaced the paid mobile port that came out in 2010, the one I had intended to play all along). It has fully hijacked a work of art that should, by all rights, be as ubiquitous as Skyrim. And this was already a dirt cheap game; Smash Bros. Fighter Packs cost more.

Image: Source Gaming. Literally the least triggering, gross, embarrassing, or otherwise unpleasant ad I got while playing PvZ Free was this Monopoly one. By and large, these games looked outright fake.

Today, Plants vs. Zombies is big business. It’s one of Electronic Arts’ premiere series, ever since it gobbled up PopCap for over $750 million back in 2011. A year after the purchase, the latter was hit with layoffs as part of an initiative to move hard to mobile and free to play titles, a direction they’ve held since. And PvZ was one of the series hit worst by this with new entries that have been monetized to hell and back. Plants vs. Zombies 2 gated the better plants behind paywalls, making it nigh-impossible to play its levels without acquiescing to either paying up or grinding forever. Plants vs. Zombies 3 is… let’s call it “vaguely existent;” since 2019, it’s been in various alphas, betas, and soft launches all exclusive to specific countries that make it hard to get a clear idea of what it’s fully supposed to be. There are also multiple spinoffs, most notably a series of third person shooters and a Dark Horse Comics tie-in series that answers every question we had about Crazy Dave and then some. All of the above appear to have much uglier art styles, less satisfying gameplay loops, but about the same level of humor.

Image: Polygon. A promotional screenshot of Plants vs. Zombies 2. The original art style has already become far less distinct, and the new plants look rather ugly.

It might be unfair to treat EA as a singular villain here. PopCap co-founder Brian Fiete admitted in an excellent 2020 retrospective interview with Kotaku that the company was heading towards something close to this at least a year before the purchase. They were struggling to compete on Facebook when that was the new market, prioritizing marketing over core game design, and generally losing direction. A publisher built around accessible, cheap, but rock solid casual games was always going to have a tough row to hoe in a market that would soon denigrate such products. But it’s also undeniable that the purchase drove them full tilt into monetization that was demoralizing inside the studio and out. There is a sad cosmic humor that PvZ2’s pay to win problems stemmed in part from a direct recommendation by John Riccitiello—then-CEO of EA, the man behind last year’s Unity pricing debacle, and archenemy of Suda 51. A game that came from nothing but wild creative abandon was brought down by a sequel produced in part by one of the most unhinged hyper-capitalist lunatics of the gaming world. And now it’s successful but a shadow of itself; whatever traces of the indie-adjacent spark that powered it are gone. The story of Plants vs. Zombies is a legitimate tragedy for this industry.

George Fan was one of those laid off in 2011. A 2017 claim from Binding of Isaac’s Edmund McMillen that it was over his objections to Plants vs. Zombies 2’s “pay to win” model spread like wildfire, but it’s also not correct (Fan opposed the model, but he also hadn’t been working on the sequel—his project was unrelated after losing interest in PvZ’s rapid franchising). Afterwards, he went indie along with Rich Werner and Kurt Pfeiffer, the person behind the 360 port. Days after his firing, he started work on what became Octogeddon, a 2018 strategy game released to mildly positive reviews and nowhere near PvZ’s cultural dominance. Perhaps that’s for the best.

Image: Source Gaming. The final battle against Dr. Zomboss, the game’s way of imagining a tower defense boss battle. Set on the roof level as one of the many gimmick mini-games, it’s fun and frenetic.

So what are we left with? As a franchise, Plants vs. Zombies is a bloated cautionary tale. It has a two-act life of its own, and in the second it looks like both of its belligerents at their worst: as unmoving and conservative as a plant, and shambling past its due date like a zombie. The series has become symbolic of a market so cheap that it infected even Mario. But, that in no way breaks the original Plants vs. Zombies, which is addicting and brilliant and as good as a game can be. This tower defense triumph is fun, it’s accessible, and at no point do its casual or hardcore or strategic or cartoony sides compromise each other. Rarely do you find a video game so right to be an inspiration for a Billie Eilish song. If you have a system or computer that can play the original version, spring for the five bucks. It’s worth every penny.

Next game: Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

Read all of “Gun Metal Gaming” here.