Olly Bas

Written in Arabic, not translated into it

Every question exists twice: once in English and once in Egyptian Arabic, written the way people actually talk rather than run through a translator. The buttons stay in English, so nobody gets lost switching mid-game.

A 600 needs a second step

"Who says I am inevitable?" was first written as a 600. Anyone who watched the film knows it, so it's a 400 at best. The whole top tier was rewritten around things one layer in: not the famous line, but what's on Nick Fury's pager.

Every question also has to stand on its own, because the board shuffles. A question that says "that final" arrives with no final before it.

Finding the right song, not a karaoke cover

Song clips stream from Apple's thirty-second previews, never bundled in the app. Searching for Arabic songs by their English spelling failed about five times out of six, because every title is transliterated differently. Searching in Arabic against the Egyptian store fixed it.

Artist and title both have to match, or the search happily returns a live version, a cover, or a different song entirely.

Guess Who Scored, timed by pixels

Goals are shown as an ink drawing first, then the real footage. Rather than timing 72 clips with a stopwatch, the app's timings were measured from the video itself: the drawing is grey and the reveal is in colour, so the switch shows up in the pixels to a fraction of a second.

No repeats, no identical games

A question counts as used the moment its answer hits the screen, not before, so backing out of a card leaves it fresh. And two brand-new phones never deal the same first board.