When it comes to picking IP that’s prime for adaptation, it’s hard to find a story — or rather, stories — with more staying power than “One Thousand and One Nights.”
During video game trade event Gamescom‘s Opening Night Live presentation in Germany Tuesday, new Saudi Arabia-backed developer MBC Game Studio unveiled its first project, “1001 Threads of Mazin,” an action-adventure game set within the world of the iconic collection of Arabic folk tales best known as “Arabian Nights” to the English-speaking world.
From creative director Lars Bonde, the game utilizes the classic frame story featuring the ruler Shahryar being told one story a night by his wife Scheherazade, as she attempts to stay her execution.
But rather than lead with legends like Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad, “1001 Threads of Mazin” will shift the famous storyweaver focus to three new characters and unlikely heroes — Yusra, Malik and Sufyan — as they attempt to rediscover the lost power of the Mizan in a quest to take down an ancient jinn king before his thirst for vengeance destroys humanity.
“From day one, one of the things that was really important to us was ‘1,001 Arabian Nights’ has been around for a long time, and it is not a singular story, it’s a collection of stories and it’s a collection of stories that were built that was taken up over years,” MBC Game Studio CEO Daniel Engelhardt tells Variety. “The oral storytelling tradition in the region is just incredible, and so we looked at it as really a launching off pad, not just we’re only going to tell the story of ‘1,001 Arabian Nights,’ but it’s a chance to tap into Arabic folklore more broadly.”
Per the game’s description, “It’s a journey made to be shared: built for up to three players with drop-in, dropout co-op, you and your friends can take to the skies on flying carpets to bring down jinn of colossal scale together. The flying carpet traversal and gameplay system is at the heart of ‘1001 Threads of Mizan’ and allows players to fly through the world, delivering a sense of adventure, speed and possibility that opens up a world of storytelling and gameplay opportunities.”
Backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund-owned MBC Group, “1001 Threads of Mazin” maker MBC Game Studio led by Engelhardt, a former gaming exec for Lionsgate, and COO Trevor Williams. While made up of a global team of developers — vets from BioWare, Hi-Rez, Ubisoft Montréal, Bungie and more game studios — the “Threads of Mazin” leadership team has put a particular emphasis on hiring Arabic developers, folklore experts and actors to work on the project.
“Some of the first hires that we made were on the folklore side of the equation, and really being able to deeply understand that,” Engelhardt says. “One of our heads of folklore, she’s from the region, was educated there. She did get her master’s at UC Berkeley. The other person who leads that department is a literary PhD, a literary historian who quite literally was teaching classes on ‘1,001 Arabian Nights’ at UCLA when we met him. So it’s like really just an incredible encyclopedia.”
Engelhardt adds: “We don’t have the creator of ‘1,001 Arabian Nights,’ there wasn’t a singular creator, and they certainly wouldn’t be around today. So the best way to get to it was to really build a team and make them central to the development process. So they aren’t consultants; they’re part of the design team. They’re within the world and narrative team, and they play a material role in shaping the vision for the game across the mechanics, the world, the narrative, art, everything. That was a fundamental building block.”
This method extended to the actual game designers, who Engelhardt says made suggestions that affected the game’s story, in addition to its aesthetic and gameplay: “Some of the earliest hires were artists in the region. They have contributed incredibly meaningfully to the project. In the demo, you’ll see a fallen jinn. That was a concept that came from one of our artists in the region who said, OK, well, if there’s been centuries of battles between an evil jinn faction and humanity, perhaps some pieces of them would still remain in the world? And then they took it even a step further and said, you lose your jinn magic, and that’s taken up within that.”
Though the team is not yet ready to reveal its cast, Engelhardt says the “1001 Threads of Mazin” trailer featuring a voice-over from Shahrazad was acted out by a native Arabic speaker, and that is the standard being set for the game’s casting process.
“Anyone who is in the game will be an Arabic speaker who’s both doing the English and Arabic versions,” Engelhardt says. “This has been particularly meaningful to us as we’ve been developing the project, because when we do casting sessions and the actors come in to audition, we’re telling their story, right? They’re coming in and seeing this story that we’re telling that represents lore that they’ve heard from their grandparents or uncles or aunts and so it means a lot to them when they see that. And we’ve seen pretty tremendous emotional responses. When you’re working on a project for this long, it’s nice when you get those touch points of motivation. We’re like, oh, this is an exciting project that we believe will appeal globally or around the world, but to be able to have in the region that kind of resonance and that kind of emotional response is really exciting to us.”
While no release date has been set for “1001 Threads of Mizan,” which is being developed for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC, MBC is already bullish on early marketing by offering hands-on demos for consumers, press and content creators on the show floor at Gamescom this week.