Recent reports have revealed that Electronic Arts (EA) canceled Project Hot Tub, a new Plants vs. Zombies game from PopCap Games.
This information was first published by IGN. If you’re interested in EA and PopCap Games games, you can check out our other articles here.
EA Canceled Project Hot Tub, PopCap Games’ New Plants vs. Zombies Game
IGN reported that in 2015, a small team of about 30 developers at PopCap Vancouver started working on a Plants vs Zombies spin-off game called Project Hot Tub.
According to IGN, Project Hot Tub “will be an action-adventure game with the ‘open corridor’ progression of Uncharted, the combat of something like Batman: Arkham Knight, but the family-friendly vibe of Ratchet and Clank“.
Project Hot Tub features a pair of teenage brothers who are thrown back in time by a zombie-corrupted experiment. They will team up with familiar plants from the Plants vs. Zombies franchise to fight zombie enemies in various historical eras.
As IGN puts it, the game is codenamed “Project Hot Tub” as it refers to the movie Hot Tub Time Machine and will feature levels based on the present, pirate island, wild west, and the far future.
According to IGN, Project Hot Tub already has 20 minutes of playable gameplay, animated cinematics, and a planned release in 2017. Interestingly, all parts of the presentation were well received by EA executives who saw it in 2016.
IGN notes that Project Hot Tub was canceled through no fault of its own so that the developers could be moved onto the Star Wars action-adventure single-player game started by Visceral Games, where that project was ultimately canceled in 2017.
Character/world artist Tom Bramall who worked on the two new Plants vs. Zombies games, Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 and Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville, shared concept art for some of the game’s canceled levels in 2018.
