Michael Jackson being removed from Plants vs Zombies

This marks a sad day for fans in general and yet another reason to hate lawyers in general…

According to PopCap they have received a request from the estate of Michael Jackson asking them to remove the Dancing Zombie from their Plants vs Zombies games due to the obvious link between a dead dancing zombies and a dead dancing popstar.

The kicker though is that Plants vs Zombies was originally released when Michael Jackson was still alive and was a huge hit at the time, at no time during his life did MJ decide his zombie parody was insulting or did he ever request for it to be removed.

So which plonker in the estate now feels they know more about Michael’s wishes than the man himself?

Needless to say PopCap aren’t stupid and realise that this would be hard to fight in court so they are now removing him from all future versions and will likely release a patch to remove him from all existing versions.

Stupid lawyers ruining some good hearted fun…

The official statement by PopCap is

“The Estate of Michael Jackson objected to our use of the ‘dancing zombie’ in PLANTS vs. ZOMBIES based on its view that the zombie too closely resembled Michael Jackson. After receiving this objection, PopCap made a business decision to retire the original ‘dancing zombie’ and replace it with a different ‘dancing zombie’ character for future builds of PLANTS vs.ZOMBIES on all platforms. The phase-out and replacement process is underway”

Source: MTV

Last Updated: July 28, 2010