Previewing 1001 Threads of Mizan at Gamescom 2026 was bizarre. It is not totally uncommon to attend a preview at a conference not knowing what you are getting into. To protect from leaks, sometimes you’ll get invites for appointments mysteriously titled something like “Brand New Studio and Game Preview Opportunity – Gamescom 2026.” The general practice in this case is to ask for some details so you know what you’re getting into and, if you’re a freelancer, if you can get commissioned to cover it.
In the case of one appointment this year, when I inquired as to what the mystery game on offer could be, I was told, “We think this game is going to be heavily talked about following its unveil on [Opening Night Live] but you’ll have to take our word for it. Due to concern over leaks, it’s hard to say much more. We realize it’s difficult to book blind but what I can say is that it’s a big budget, three player co-op action-adventure game made by vets from various top tier western developers. They’ve been in stealth for a few years working on this and it’s going to make a big splash at Gamescom on the show floor.”
Despite that general vagueness, sometimes you take the gamble; after all, who knows, this might very well be the next big thing. Color me surprised when, during Opening Night Live, 1001 Threads of Mizan—a game based on One Thousand and One Nights, or as it’s more commonly known in the West, “Arabian Nights”—was announced, and I noticed this post from prolific industry analyst Daniel Ahmed highlighting that it had been developed by a Saudi Arabian game studio.
For those unfamiliar, as part of Saudi Vision 2030, the Saudi government, and in turn Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, have been investing greatly in diversifying the country’s economy to be less dependent on its finite oil supply. Some of this takes the form of sportswashing—using teams like Newcastle United and companies like WWE and UFC to lobby for the image of a country with a rather horrendous history of abusing the human rights of those living inside its borders.
Video games are no stranger to this, with famed arcade company SNK being bought out by Misk (also known as the Mohammed bin Salman Foundation) in 2022, while just last month a consortium of PIF (the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund), Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners completed a leveraged buyout of Electronic Arts for $55 billion. These huge buyouts aren’t just designed to diversify the economy of Saudi Arabia, but often to push the morals and culture of the country, where queer relations are punishable by death; see the inclusion of the Crown Prince’s favorite footballer, Cristiano Ronaldo, and his favorite DJ, Salvatore Ganacci, in the lethally uncool Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.
All that is to say that 1001 Threads of Mizan is as close to an in-house effort at triple-A game development as we have seen from Saudi Arabia, being developed by a new studio called MBC Game Studio. MBC Group is the current name of the former Middle East Broadcast Center, which is 54-percent owned by PIF following a high-profile case in which the Saudi government summoned and arrested several of the previous owners in Riyadh on corruption charges, including the current Chairman and 36-percent owner, Waleed bin Ibrahim (who was found innocent of all charges following an 83-day incarceration).
While highlighting different cultures in video games is a noble goal, it should be noted in no uncertain terms that this game is being developed by a studio being funded and run by the Public Investment Fund. PIF is an organization whose chairman is Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who was critical of the Crown Prince, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where his body was dismembered and disposed of in a suitcase.
I toyed with the idea of cancelling my appointment after receiving an email from PR confirming this was indeed the unnamed game I had signed up to see. In the end I decided to attend mostly to see what, if any, acknowledgement of PIF or the Saudi government’s involvement in the game I could get. While demoing the game alongside two other journalists that I believe were Dutch, we were overseen and talked through the vertical slice by the creative director, Lars Bonde, best known for his work on the Watch Dogs franchise.
Something I need to make clear here: if you are talking to journalists during a preview, that is on the record. We do not need to establish that we are on the record; by talking to us at a press event, you are on the record. Saying “that was off the record” after taking a poke at a former employee like Bonde did early on in the demo does not mean that I cannot quote that he described 1001 Threads of Mizan as payback for a cancelled Prince of Persia game he worked on at Ubisoft.
It was at this point that I started to record the audio of the demo session, as while all this was already on the record, I wanted to ensure that I had an accurate transcript of everything being said. As I was still setting up my recording, one of my co-op partners asked the first pointed question of the session, inquiring where the studio was based. Bonde took a rather liberal interpretation of this question, telling us MBC Game Studio is a “global” studio and that most employees work remotely.
“So we’re fully remote, and that has really allowed us to hire a lot,” he said before listing employees with credits at places like BioWare, Hi-Rez, Ubisoft, and more.
When I asked him where the inspiration for the game came from, highlighting that he mentioned working on a Prince of Persia game at some point, Lars explained, “I mean, how many games based on A Thousand and One Nights have you played? It’s an open IP, and it’s accessible. It’s really underserved…and I think it’s also a culture that is largely underserved. Both from a gaming perspective, like games for them, but this is still a global game. The stories of Thousand and One Nights [are] global, but it’s also to give the opportunity. We have character artists, environment artists, concept artists sitting in Egypt, some in Riyadh as well. That’s what we get from being decentralized and being able to work on this game…I was in Dubai for some presentation stuff where some of the concept artists, I flew them in from Egypt, and they were getting emotional because they get to represent… their culture and their world.”
One of the other journalists I was with, seeming to pick up on the line of questioning I was pursuing, began to say, “Can I ask, is it easy to get funding when you [are] in-”, at which Bonde interrupted to say, “That was never part of it. We honestly, from our backers, we had complete creative freedom. It was just a no-brainer. We’re like, ‘this is such a rich’—I mean, I love the Assassin’s Creed—Origins—that’s set in Egypt… Like [Assassin’s Creed] Mirage, even as a small game, it’s a nice game, right? So it’s a nice setting, and this is just something fresh on it.”
After a short break so that my co-op partners and I could focus on fighting a mid-boss, I sought to broach this topic again, asking if the team was self-publishing, to which Bonde replied, “We are self-publishing. That is correct, yes.” And when I followed up by asking about the funding for such a venture, Bonde told me, “Yeah, we’re literally building our own publishing unit” before saying “Your teammate is down,” quickly shifting the conversation back to the ongoing gameplay.
Only some of this will come through in text, but there was an evasiveness throughout this appointment. As the demo went on, the conversation shifted toward the spectacle of a boss fight and the mechanics of flying a carpet through bullet hell–like projectile attacks, where Bonde appeared much more comfortable giving direct answers. During this time, Bonde did tell us that he was “call number two” as the studio was being established, after the CEO. However, as the demo ended and we were greeted with a splash screen containing a QR code and a message prompting us to “wishlist here,” I decided to push for actual clarity about the studio’s affiliations, pointing at the stylized developer logo on screen.
“Quick question: is it MBC or WBC?” I asked. “MBC,” Bonde told us. To which one of the other demoers asked, “And what country are you part of?” Bonde seemed slightly caught off guard by this question, replying, “Sorry?” And the other journalist clarified, “What country are you part of? Because the organization—” Before he could fully finish that question, Bonde interjected again, seemingly to not answer the question that was likely about to be asked. “This is a really decentralized company. We [are] completely decentralized.”
At this point, I was pretty fed up with the level of non-answers we had been getting, so I asked, “On the record. There were claims going around Twitter and Bluesky that MBC [is] a Saudi Arabian company and—.” “It is the Middle East Broadcast company, yes,” Bonde eventually clarified, noticeably avoiding the name “Saudi Arabia.” “[MBC is] the biggest media provider in all of MENA, so yeah, all of North Africa and the Middle East. They have, I don’t know even know how many television channels they have. They are the biggest streaming service provider as well. They wanted to get into games; that was the opportunity we got…This is the new studio. It’s why we also [built] it up as a publisher. This is a serious undertaking. This is also why we knew we [didn’t] want to just come out and say, ‘Here’s a new studio, and here’s a trailer.’ We are like, ‘Here’s a new games studio. Here’s the trailer, but come play the game.’”
Before I had a chance to even realize that Bonde hadn’t actually acknowledged the Saudi government or PIF’s controlling stake in MBC, I was informed that he and the other two journalists would be going elsewhere to conduct a further interview in Dutch. All this leads me to ask, “Why was I, a queer transgender journalist, invited to play a game being developed by a studio controlled and funded by PIF, a non-profit chaired by a head of state who believes I should be executed for the crime of being gay? And why was the creative director put in the same room as me, only to not answer almost any of my questions?”
Was the assumption that journalists wouldn’t know, or think to check, what MBC is? Or that we wouldn’t ask any questions of developers helping gamewash the image of a state known for its human rights violations? Either way, I was mostly left wishing I spoke Dutch because the two other journalists invited me to sit in on their interview, and I would have loved to pick his brain about whether any queer developers are working on the project or how he feels about the ever-growing influence of organizations like PIF and Misk in the video game industry.
1001 Threads isn’t a terrible video game in a vacuum. There is some novelty in teaming up against towering bosses with friends and flying through the desert on floating carpets. But even in the demo it felt slight. This is the same mild enthusiasm I usually keep reserved for talking about how it’s kind of neat to fly around in Anthem or whale on A.I.M. henchmen with some friends in Square Enix’s Avengers. It is not the kind of excitement that would spur me to leave my morals at the door and give 60-80 bucks to a company backed by a government that hates me.
