Plants vs. Zombies is a 2009 tower defense video game developed and published by PopCap Games. First released for Windows and macOS, 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 placing plants or fungi, which fire projectiles at the zombies, or otherwise detrimentally affect them, or aid the player. The player collects a resource called "sun" to place plants. If a zombie reaches 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. Its development spanned three and a half years. Rich Werner was the main artist, Tod Semple served as programmer, 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 the game.

Plants vs. Zombies was critically acclaimed, nominated for multiple awards, including "Download Game of the Year" and "Strategy Game of the Year" as part of the Golden Joystick Awards 2010, and has since been considered one of the greatest video games of all time. Reviewers praised the game's humorous art style, simplistic but engaging gameplay, and soundtrack. Upon release, it was the fastest-selling video game developed by PopCap Games and quickly became their best-selling game, surpassing Bejeweled and Peggle. 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 sequels, three third-person shooters, two comic book series, and several spin-off games, most of which have received positive reviews. A remaster, titled Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted, was released in October 2025.

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, blocking. There are also support plants with creative abilities. Different types of zombies have their own special behaviors and their own weaknesses to different plants. For example, the Balloon Zombie can float over the player's plants, but its balloon can be popped by the Cactus. Other examples of zombies include the Disco 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 zombies come in waves. With each wave defeated, another wave arrives and the density of zombies increases. At the end of every level, and often in the middle of levels too, there's an extra-large wave of zombies led by a flag-holding zombie.

The player can pick a limited number of types of plants through seed packets at the beginning of each level, and use a resource called "sun" to place them. 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, or 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 that lane without any last line of defense, the game ends, which forces the player to restart the level (or streak for Vasebreaker Endless).

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 21), zombies begin to occasionally drop in-game money when killed. After level 34, 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 54 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 also 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 final level of stage five occur at night.

During the nighttime stages, the player should use 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, all plants except Tangle Kelp and Sea-shroom must be 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. And 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. Also, all plants must be planted on top of a Flower Pot, which is the only plant able to be directly planted on the roof.

Adventure mode's last level pits the player against Dr. Edgar George Zomboss, an evil scientist and the zombies' animator. He destroys the player's plants by having his Zombot crush the plants or throw vans at them. He can additionally place fire and ice balls that roll across a lane. The player must subdue these balls with Ice-shrooms and Jalapeños respectively. After completing the Adventure mode, the player can choose to play it again, this time with plants unlocked from the previous play-through, along 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 by Plants. 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. If there are no zombies present in the lawn and not all 5 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), a game over occurs that forces the player to restart the puzzle (finite levels) or streak (endless version). Survival mode offers a selection of levels in which the player chooses plants to defeat increasingly challenging waves of zombies.

Development Concept

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 where 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 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