One of the most-talked about games at Gamescom 2026 this year was a title no one had ever heard of, coming from a studio gamers didn’t even know existed — but both of those things are likely to change in the next year, with MBC Game Studio making big plans for its launch title, 1001 Threads of Mizan, its own take on 1001 Arabian Nights.
The debut trailer for the fantasy adventure game — the first release from the new studio owned and supported by Middle East-based media company MBC Group — racked up close to 70 million views in its first week of release, with the 20-minute playable demo prompting fans to brave three-hour-long lines across the four-day Gamescom convention. A reimagining of traditional Arabic folktales, 1001 Threads of Mizan is a three-player co-op adventure game that places players on the front lines of a battle to prevent corrupted supernatural beings return to plague the mortal world. Seeing the demo land the game on best-of lists from the show was the latest step in a journey that’s already lasted years.
“We pretty meaningfully started scaling the team at MBC Game Studio in 2023 but obviously, there was a lot of conceptualizing leading up to that,” says Daniel Engelhardt, CEO of MBC Game Studio and a gaming industry veteran whose resume includes Fortnite x John Wick and Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted. “I’ve been in games and media for a long time – I helped build the games business at Lionsgate with Peter Levin – and when I got connected to MBC, we were talking about what it would mean to build a games business for them. What was really exciting was, MBC was willing to look at games as an opportunity to build new IP, not as a licensing activity.”
There’s a reason for that, according to Mike Sneesby, CEO of parent company MBC Group: Gaming is an international medium in ways that other narrative forms can’t achieve.
“MBC Group’s vision is all about taking stories that are rooted with their hearts in the Arab world, and forging a global footprint for our media company, and when you think about the traditions of television and feature films, you have certain constraints of culture and language,” he explains. “I think the incredible thing for gaming as a launchpad is that it has its own global language that transcends culture and the spoken language. So, the idea that you can take these stories, regardless of where they originate from, for us originating in the Arab world, transcending language barriers and building a global platform, I think that’s an incredible starting point.”
The focus on source material with a specific geographical origin led to looking at 1,001 Nights – a collection of Middle Eastern folktales originally compiled in the Islamic Golden Age, connected through the framing device of Scheherazade telling her husband, King Shahryar, stories over a number of years. Some of the stories inside 1,001 Nights are well known around the world, with “Aladdin,” “Sinbad the Sailor” and “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves” being the most famous.
“We felt that if we could tap into a deep mythology, it would give us a running head start,” Engelhardt says. “We could dive into a world that has some story and narrative and world building, and so we started looking at mythologies around the world, and we quickly realized that 1001 Arabian Nights was a really unique opportunity. It’s globally recognized, but we felt that we could bring a really unique lens to it by going deep into the original manuscripts. [1001 Threads of Mizan] is reflective of an incredible storytelling tradition, an oral storytelling tradition, in the region, so we looked at it as not just 1001 Arabian Nights, but a launching off path to tap into Arabian mythology more broadly.”
The team took its mission seriously, immediately bringing historians and academics in-house to help developers fully appreciate the material they were working with. “These are not consultants, they’re built into our team to really make sure that we were starting to deeply understand the spirit of this material,” per Engelhardt. “We felt that, by taking that approach, we could bring a unique lens to this material that felt very familiar because of the more Western adaptations that have existed, and bring players on a journey that would feel unique and taste different than what they’ve seen before, both in terms of games, but also the ways that they’ve that they’ve seen this IP reflected in you know in other iterations.”
The work that went into building 1001 Threads was never intended to be limited to a single videogame, Engelhardt reveals. Sure enough, the Gamescom unveiling of the property was accompanied by trading cards from Upper Deck, and a storybook from Titan Publishing. “As we think about the business that we’re building for MBC, harking back to the early conversations we had with them, we look at what we’re doing as an IP engine for the broader MBC platform,” he says. “The game must be great first, no question; it really starts with making a great game experience. But as we’re building the game, we’re very thoughtful about the mythology that we’re building, that hopefully it can support you know activities outside of the game, things like [partnerships with] Upper Deck and Titan eventually film and TV.”
The ambition of that last part is something that MBC Group’s Sneesby echoes: “I think what we’re seeing with the amount of television and feature films that’s being created around the world, increasingly you need IP, you need a platform that gives you a head start. And without alluding to what the future might hold, I think this platform has the opportunity to be a launchpad for other forms and derivatives of what could come in the future. We’re equally excited about what the future holds as we’re excited for the game itself.”
In the short term, the plan is to take it easy for the next few months – “there’s a small indie game called Grand Theft Auto coming out in November that might take up some attention,” Englehardt jokes – before picking the promotion in early 2027 headed towards launch on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC.
“Of course, we can’t have as big of a surprise as we had at Gamescom,” admits Englehardt, “but we want to try to continue to surprise players with more information and more exciting pieces to the puzzle, and just continue to bring them on that journey with us.”