George Fan (born 1978) is an American video game designer who currently works as the creative director of All Yes Good.
He designed Insaniquarium (2001), Plants vs. Zombies (2009; which started the video game franchise of the same name), Octogeddon (2018), and Hardhat Wombat (2023).
Before going into game design, Fan graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000 with a degree in computer science.
He eventually formed Flying Bear Entertainment and created Insaniquarium, which became a finalist for the 2002 Independent Games Festival.
He then joined Blizzard Entertainment and worked there while simultaneously developing Insaniquarium further for PopCap Games, releasing the "Deluxe" edition in 2004.
[7][8] Fan said to Chris Carter, editor-in-chief of Destructoid, that before creating Wrath of the Gopher, he was unsure of whether or not he could be a game designer.
[5] In 2001, Fan and Tysen Henderson founded Flying Bear Entertainment in California to work on a virtual pets video game project named FishTank.
"[9] Flying Bear Entertainment published it on August 31, 2001, as a free Java-based online game called Insaniquarium.
[17] The game was also released for Palm OS and Windows Mobile phones and personal digital assistants on August 6, 2008.
Fan tried to become a designer at Blizzard, though found it hard to persuade other employees to his ideas, leading him to conclude that he preferred to work in smaller teams.
[10] Fan eventually became inspired by his project Insaniquarium and Warcraft III mods to create a new game.
[20] Fan thought about creating a defense-oriented version of Insaniquarium for the Nintendo DS utilizing its dual-screen.
[10] PopCap set Fan up with a team consisting of Tod Semple, Rich Werner, and Laura Shigihara, who each filled the role of programmer, artist, and composer respectively; Fan would also voice the game's tutorial character, named "Crazy Dave" after David Rohrl, himself.
[24] The game garnered positive reception from critics, being assigned an aggregate score of 87/100 by Metacritic.
[26][27][28] James Gwertzman, the vice president of the Asia/Pacific division of PopCap, revealed in a presentation at GDC China 2010 that the game had sold 1.5 million copies internationally.
According to Jason Schreier of Kotaku, when EA directed PopCap towards making free-to-play games with transactions, "Fan no longer fit in.
A circulating rumor that Fan was fired because of his opposition to EA's freemium model was based on a statement by Edmund McMillen, the creator of The Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy.