By the time FIFA 14 landed on Wii, the console was well into its twilight years, which made certification an interesting exercise in supporting a platform that the industry was slowly moving on from. The Wii version ran on older tech with motion controls still in the mix — making sure all of that still held up across every required region and age rating was its own quiet kind of archaeology.
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.
