While casual game studio PopCap has made a tonne of fantastic games, including the likes of Bejewelled and Peggle, co-founder Jason Kapalka is surprised that parent company EA has not really continued exploring the studio’s IP.
Out of all of the studio’s litany of franchises, Plants vs Zombies is the most exploited, but even then the series has only really been expanded into a third-person shooter spin-off. Speaking to FRVR, Kapalka reveals he thought EA was planning to do more with the comedic tower defence series following their acquisition of PopCap back in 2011.
“I’m a little surprised that EA hasn’t done more with the brand and, you know, other licenses,” Kapalka said. “There’s some comic books, but they haven’t really done TV shows or movies, which I’m a little surprised by.”
Kapalka explained that there are fans out in the world that are creating their own versions of Plants vs Zombies that have proven extremely popular. The PopCap co-founder pointed towards a fan project known as Plants vs Zombies: Fusion, a game which lets players combine a number of different characters together that offer unique gameplay mechanics.
“They call it fusion where you kind of combine plants and make hybrid plants to do multiple things,” he said. “I mean, it’s entirely from the community, something that was entirely built by hackers and whatnot. I think even EA has had to kind of at least acknowledge it and it it so… it’s apparently quite a complex variant, but I’m all for that. That’s all pretty good.”
PopCap’s official series eventually replicated the fusion mechanics of the popular fan game with the release of Plants vs Zombies 3: Evolved. However, it wasn’t as complicated or in-depth as the fan version which has seen years of updates.
The PopCap co-founder explained that the studio was trying to do “more complex” games before he departed the company. “Actually, we were going to merge with or acquire the studio that did Torchlight, Runic, because that was our idea of kind of if PopCap was doing Diablo, that’s what it would look like. Unfortunately, that deal fell apart, but that would have been the kind of thing we’d like to do is things of that nature.”
Plants vs Zombies is a series with an incredible brand identity, with fantastic character designs and a world that’s perfect for a Saturday morning cartoon. Kapalka jokes that, after the Minecraft movie, PvZ could have made its way to the big screen at some point, saying that actor Jack Back “basically is Crazy Dave”.
The latest official Plants vs Zombies release is PopCap and The Lost Pixels’ 2025 remaster of the original game, Plants vs Zombies: Replanted. The remaster allows players to speed up the game and play through some new game modes. However, the game was criticised for poor-quality upscaling of the original game’s art assets.
