How a Plants vs. Zombies Game Died so a Star Wars Game Could Live (and Then Also Die)

ign.com:

In the second half of 2016, a small team of developers at PopCap Vancouver were gearing up for a presentation that would determine the future of their team, their project, and potentially an already-beloved franchise: Plants vs. Zombies.

For the past year, they had been working on a brand new Plants vs. Zombies adventure that would take the series in a very different direction. Though they had EA’s blessing for their work to that point, it wasn’t a guarantee the project would ultimately see the light of day, especially given how ambitious it was.

It was called Project Hot Tub, a humorous but vague reference to 2010 film Hot Tub Time Machine. It was to be an action-adventure game with the ‘open corridor’ progression of an Uncharted, the combat of something like Batman: Arkham Knight, but the family-friendly vibes of a Ratchet and Clank. Project Hot Tub featured a pair of teenage sibling leads who were thrown back in time by a zombie-corrupted experiment, teaming up with familiar plants from the Plants vs. Zombies series to fight off zombie foes across multiple historical eras. The project represented a major leap for a franchise previously confined to tower defense and third-person shooters, and would potentially stretch some new muscles for publisher EA, whose category of family-friendly, single-player adventures was sorely lacking.

Project Hot Tub was internally planned for a late 2017 release. As we know now, it never materialized. But it’s not necessarily because the project was in trouble. In fact, everything we know about Project Hot Tub indicates that its ideas, development, and progression were going strong right up until its cancellation. It hadn’t run into any major budget issues, deadline misses, scope problems,