MBC Game Studio revealed 1001: Threads of Mizan at Opening Night Live during Gamescom, and the game's central hook is exactly what it sounds like: you ride flying carpets through a sprawling Arabian fantasy world and use them to take down Jinn of genuinely colossal scale. The reveal landed alongside a playable demo on the Gamescom show floor, which is a bold first move for a brand-new studio.
The game supports 1 to 3 players with drop-in, drop-out co-op, and it's targeting a simultaneous launch across PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, Steam, and the Epic Games Store. No release window has been confirmed yet.
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Three heroes, one ancient war
The story is narrated by Shahrazad, the legendary storyteller from One Thousand and One Nights, and follows three heroes: Yusra, a relic hunter who fights with a bow; Malik, a heavy warrior; and Sufyan, a pirate who wields a whip blade capable of area attacks. Each character plays distinctly, and the demo made clear that their different kits are designed to complement each other during boss fights rather than overlap.
The lore sets up a war between the human world and the Jinn, ancient supernatural beings from Arabian and Islamic tradition who live in a parallel realm. Two kings, one human and one Jinn, once built a shared civilization before fear and betrayal tore it apart. That backstory isn't just window dressing. It feeds directly into the game's enemy design, with Jinn creatures ranging from standard enemies to screen-filling colossi.
Creative director Lars Bonde compared the scale of certain encounters to Shadow of the Colossus, and the demo's culminating boss fight against a creature called the Sand Knight backs that up. There's also Najou, a fallen Jinn princess described as a colossus that requires the full three-player team to distract and bring down.
The carpet system is doing real mechanical work
Here's the thing: flying carpet traversal in a triple-A action game could easily feel like a gimmick bolted onto a standard combat loop. From the demo, it doesn't. The carpets are the core of how movement and combat interact. They make fights fast and positional, they're how you reach weak points on large enemies, and they're what makes the world actually worth exploring at speed.
Bonde described the carpet system as the answer to a specific design question: how do you build a single-player-scale epic adventure that works cooperatively without feeling like one player is just following another? The answer, apparently, is to give everyone a vehicle that makes independent movement feel natural while keeping the team spatially connected during fights.
A studio built specifically for this game
MBC Game Studio was founded roughly two years ago, backed by MBC Group, the largest media company in the Middle East. CEO Daniel Engelhardt came from Lionsgate Games, COO Trevor Williams and the broader team draw from BioWare, Hi-Rez, Ubisoft Montréal, and Bungie. Game director Scott Lussier rounds out the leadership.
The studio has people from 18 different countries on the team, and they brought in local literary historians and cultural experts from the start of development rather than as consultants after the fact. The narrator actress is from the region. The team has both native English and native Arabic speakers.
Engelhardt was direct about what MBC's backing actually means in practice: financial support for a slow, methodical build with creative freedom to develop new IP rather than license existing properties. The studio has its own publishing operation embedded with the development team, which is unusual and worth noting given how often publishing and dev misalignment derails new IP launches.
The game runs on Unreal Engine and the team has a firm policy against using generative AI in development.
What this reveal actually signals
New triple-A IP is genuinely rare right now. Most publishers are retreating to sequels and live service extensions, so a brand-new studio swinging for a global triple-A action game with a simultaneous multi-platform launch is the kind of bet that either pays off big or becomes a cautionary tale. Engelhardt acknowledged as much, saying the game has to be great for the studio to succeed.
The Arabian Nights mythology is well-suited to games in ways that haven't been fully explored. Flying carpets, massive supernatural creatures, a world that spans two parallel realms, and a cast of heroes with distinct archetypes are all mechanics waiting to happen. 1001: Threads of Mizan isn't the first game to pull from this lore, but it's the first to put that lore at the center of a triple-A co-op action game built from the ground up around it.
For players who want to track the game's progress, the adventure games space has been heating up with ambitious new releases, and 1001: Threads of Mizan looks like one of the more interesting entries coming through the pipeline. If you're also following other upcoming action-adventure titles, the gaming guides hub is a good place to stay up to date on what's worth your time once these games actually ship.
