This one was a trip. A beloved PC classic from the 90s, rebuilt as a freemium mobile game — which meant certification wasn’t just about making sure it ran properly on iOS and Android. It also meant verifying that every in-app purchase flow, every gem prompt, every timer gate behaved exactly as declared across storefronts. Monetisation compliance is its own discipline, and Dungeon Keeper had a lot of it.
Back in the day, before studios started shipping bugs as features, I worked through the full certification process on the other side of the screen — testing games for Electronic Arts. Certification & compliance, which sounds dry but basically means being the last line of defense before a game hits the shelves: making sure it doesn’t crash, doesn’t cheat the rating system, and does exactly what it says on the box in every region it’s going to land in.
It wasn’t glamorous work, but it gave me something most designers never get: a really intimate understanding of how games break, and why. Every bug report I filed was a small lesson in the gap between intention and execution — which, turns out, is pretty much what design is about too.
