\n\tWhen it comes to picking IP that\u2019s prime for adaptation, it\u2019s hard to find a story \u2014 or rather, stories \u2014 with more staying power than \u201cOne Thousand and One Nights.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\tDuring video game trade event Gamescom<\/a>\u2018s Opening Night Live presentation in Germany Tuesday, new Saudi Arabia-backed developer MBC Game Studio<\/a> unveiled its first project, \u201c1001 Threads of Mazin<\/a>,\u201d an action-adventure game set within the world of the iconic collection of Arabic folk tales best known as \u201cArabian Nights\u201d to the English-speaking world. <\/p>\n \n\tFrom creative director Lars Bonde, the game utilizes the classic frame story featuring the ruler\u00a0Shahryar\u00a0being told one story a night by his wife\u00a0Scheherazade, as she attempts to stay her execution. <\/p>\n \n\tBut rather than lead with legends like Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad, \u201c1001 Threads of Mazin\u201d will shift the famous storyweaver focus to three new characters and unlikely heroes \u2014 Yusra, Malik and Sufyan \u2014 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.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cFrom day one, one of the things that was really important to us was \u20181,001 Arabian Nights\u2019 has been around for a long time, and it is not a singular story, it\u2019s a collection of stories and it\u2019s a collection of stories that were built that was taken up over years,\u201d MBC Game Studio CEO Daniel Engelhardt tells Variety. \u201cThe oral storytelling tradition in the region is just incredible, and so we looked at it as really a launching off pad, not just we\u2019re only going to tell the story of \u20181,001 Arabian Nights,\u2019 but it\u2019s a chance to tap into Arabic folklore more broadly.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tPer the game\u2019s description, \u201cIt\u2019s 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 \u20181001 Threads of Mizan\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBacked by Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund-owned MBC Group, \u201c1001 Threads of Mazin\u201d 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 \u2014 vets from BioWare, Hi-Rez, Ubisoft Montr\u00e9al, Bungie and more game studios \u2014 the \u201cThreads of Mazin\u201d leadership team has put a particular emphasis on hiring Arabic developers, folklore experts and actors to work on the project.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cSome of the first hires that we made were on the folklore side of the equation, and really being able to deeply understand that,\u201d Engelhardt says. \u201cOne of our heads of folklore, she\u2019s from the region, was educated there. She did get her master\u2019s at UC Berkeley. The other person who leads that department is a literary PhD, a literary historian who quite literally was teaching classes on \u20181,001 Arabian Nights\u2019 at UCLA when we met him. So it\u2019s like really just an incredible encyclopedia.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tEngelhardt adds: \u201cWe don\u2019t have the creator of \u20181,001 Arabian Nights,\u2019 there wasn\u2019t a singular creator, and they certainly wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t consultants; they\u2019re part of the design team. They\u2019re 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.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\tThis method extended to the actual game designers, who Engelhardt says made suggestions that affected the game\u2019s story, in addition to its aesthetic and gameplay: \u201cSome of the earliest hires were artists in the region. They have contributed incredibly meaningfully to the project. In the demo, you\u2019ll see a fallen jinn. That was a concept that came from one of our artists in the region who said, OK, well, if there\u2019s 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\u2019s taken up within that.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThough the team is not yet ready to reveal its cast, Engelhardt says the \u201c1001 Threads of Mazin\u201d 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\u2019s casting process.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAnyone who is in the game will be an Arabic speaker who\u2019s both doing the English and Arabic versions,\u201d Engelhardt says. \u201cThis has been particularly meaningful to us as we\u2019ve been developing the project, because when we do casting sessions and the actors come in to audition, we\u2019re telling their story, right? They\u2019re coming in and seeing this story that we\u2019re telling that represents lore that they\u2019ve heard from their grandparents or uncles or aunts and so it means a lot to them when they see that. And we\u2019ve seen pretty tremendous emotional responses. When you\u2019re working on a project for this long, it\u2019s nice when you get those touch points of motivation. We\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhile no release date has been set for \u201c1001 Threads of Mizan,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \n\tSee the announcement trailer in the video below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When it comes to picking IP that\u2019s prime for adaptation, it\u2019s hard to find a story \u2014 or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596905,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[269973,223568,85,46,269974,125],"class_list":["post-596904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-1001-threads-of-mazin","tag-gamescom","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mbc-game-studio","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}