iGame Radio

I downloaded PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies game recently, and I’ve been running through the game (will have a review shortly). At it’s heart, Plants vs. Zombies is a tower game. Create your towers (in this case, many different kinds of plants and plant materials) and bring down the waves of the enemy attacking you (in this case, zombies). And it plays on the big fashion for the past year…zombies.

The gameplay that I’ve seen is solid. You have a selection of tools to use against the zombies, but after a certain point you can never use all of the tools you have obtained, so you have to learn to pick wisely for each wave of zombies you have to fight against. However, you continue to gather more tools level after level. Just as the game continues to throw new zombies at you as time goes on. Makes you strategize and think, as the hardcore gamer loves to do. At the same time, the game is not so overwhelmingly hard that casual gamers are turned off by it.

This is part of the reason why PopCap will make a ton of money off of this game. But it’s not the reason why PopCap will rule the world.

PopCap will rule the world because this isn’t really a game so much as a performance. Every little aspect of the game feeds into the meme of Plants vs. Zombies. You want to keep playing…not just because you want to see if you can beat the next wave of zombies, but because you want to see what kind of zombies show up. What new plants the game has in store. What Crazy Dave is going to say to you. What the zombies will try to bribe you with next.

And PopCap went beyond the game in their performance as well. When I received my media package for the game, it included Brain Ooze (an energy drink), sunflower and pea-shooter seeds, and dirt in which to plant your zombie defense seeds. Now, that in itself is not necessarily unusual…I’ve received these themed media packages before, but usually they are for high priced hardcore games. PopCap also released a viral YouTube video, a music video of the game. My youngest flipped over it, and still sings the damn song.

And most importantly, all of this marketing feels, well, honest. It’s as though the folks at PopCap sat around trying to figure out how to market the game, and you could just imagine that they had as much fun coming up with the ideas for the marketing as they did for the game design itself. That the marketing is not just to get you to buy it, but also to *join in their fun*.

Maybe I’m just downing the wrong pills, but there’s an honesty, as I said, that you don’t always see or hear from other companies. I mean, witness what EA did at E3 with Dante’s Inferno. They had to pay a company to create a fake protest of the game with actors. I mean, doesn’t that just make the game feel like a fraud?

If you believe in your game, put your heart and soul into your game, then put that fun and joy and show that in your marketing scheme. Cause if you can’t show your joy when you market the game, then how am I supposed to believe that you had any joy in making it? And that can result in a game with no life.