Also seen in China: Plants Vs Zombies Completely Unofficial Arcade Edition

One company that has made waves in the consumer gaming sector is Pop Cap Games. They have produced a number of popular casual titles, such as Bejeweled, Peggle, Zuma and Plants Vs. Zombies. So normally we wouldn’t be covering what they do since it’s the consumer side of things, but that changed with that recent amusement trade show that took place in China where one company by the name of Shunxiang Technology was showing off a new arcade edition of Plants Vs. Zombies at their booth, which you can see above. They went all out to make it look like an official product and they even went to the trouble of producing some nice artwork to hang in the booth but I still felt like something was amiss here – why would this company that no one has ever heard of be showing of an arcade version of something as popular as PvsZ? I hadn’t even seen them in coverage of previous Chinese arcade shows so it seemed a little unusual.

As such I decided to call up PopCap Games to find out if it was a legitimate product produced by their company and as it turns out, it is not. Here is what Garth Chouteau of Popcap Games had to say on the matter:

As suspected, the Plants vs. Zombies arcade cabinet shown in the pictures is completely unauthorized by PopCap.

Which settles that quite nicely but doesn’t stop me from dreaming about something like it anyways(I wrote about the possibility of tower defense-like games in the arcade here). I  imagined that if a game like PvsZ would show up in arcades, it would use something like Adrenaline Amusements TouchFX. Anyways, this version is different than the home versions, it’s a 4 player joystick game where each player controls a plant turret that they use to shoot the zombies as they walk back and forth, or at least that is what it appears to be. It’s hard to say whether that major change to the gameplay is any fun or not, perhaps we’ll never know. Thanks to David Liu and The Stinger Report for the pictures.

Click below for close up shots of the PvsZ Arcade game