Instinct Games S.A.E. was founded in 2011 in the Heliopolis district of Cairo, Egypt, by Mostafa Hafez, who remains its founder and chief executive. Hafez brought unusual engine-level pedigree to a region with few established game studios: he co-developed the Reality Engine, the middleware technology later sold to Epic Games, and before Instinct he led Artificial Studios and Timeline Interactive. That low-level engineering background shaped the studio's identity as a technical co-developer rather than a publisher-facing brand, and its team, in the 11 to 50 range, has spent most of its life working inside other studios' games. The relationship that put Instinct on the map was with Studio Wildcard: the Cairo team did engineering work on ARK: Survival Evolved through its 2015 Steam Early Access launch and beyond, and Hafez himself has been described as a designer and lead programmer on the game, contributing to the systems that let hundreds of creatures, tribe-built structures and player-driven combat run in a single persistent world.
That partnership never ended. When Wildcard's sister studio Grapeshot Games launched the pirate MMO ATLAS in 2018 on the same technology, Instinct Games was credited as a co-developer on Steam, and when Wildcard rebuilt its flagship as ARK: Survival Ascended in Unreal Engine 5 in 2023, Instinct was again named alongside Grove Street Games as co-developer. That makes Instinct Games one of the few studios to have worked on both generations of ARK's technology, and one of the most visible examples of an Egyptian developer contributing engineering to a globally successful PC game. The PJ's Games collection for Instinct Games carries ARK: Survival Evolved for PC on Steam, the original game the studio helped bring to life.
