Blade's reported director Bassam Tariq has confirmed that he is joining the MCU to helm Marvel's upcoming Blade reboot starring Mahershala Ali.

It was previously reported that Marvel had tapped Tariq, who is best known for directing 2020's Mogul Mowgli, to helm the vampire superhero film, though it was also said that no deal had been finalized. Marvel still hasn't confirmed the news but Tariq himself recently discussed his move into the MCU during an episode of The Playlist Podcast.

"I didn't think [Blade] was going to happen, just to be very honest," Tariq said. "I'm honored and it's a privilege, but I'm here in service of Stacy Osei-Kuffour, who is the incredible writer that is writing the film… She's just a phenomenal presence and a juggernaut in her own right. And for Mahershala [Ali]. For me, it's really just working in their service.

"[Marvel] takes big swings, you know?" Tariq added, sharing his praise for the team assigned to the project, particularly Stacy Osei-Kuffour who is penning the script for Marvel's upcoming Blade movie. The new film will act as a reboot to the original 1998 film starring Wesley Snipes, which debuted a decade prior to Marvel's launch of the MCU with Iron Man.

"Character is very important for me. I don't think of genre, I think of character," Tariq said of the reboot. "It's not so boxed in as people imagine it to be [working with Marvel]. It's quite exciting. And I think the reality is there is no 'Blade' canon, you know? If you ever read the comics, they're always changing… Unfortunately, the [comic series] never lasted that long."

The Blade comics were created by writer Marv Wolfman and penciler Gene Colan and first appeared in The Tomb of Dracula #10 in 1973 — if you need a refresher, check out our history of the vampire-hunting Daywalker, covering everything from Blade's comic book origins to the badass bloodsucker's big-screen debut, and how the new Blade might fit into the MCU.

Adele Ankers is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

A new month and a new batch of games coming to different services. PlayStation announced its September 2021 PS Plus lineup, and now Xbox has announced what games are coming to Xbox Game Pass this month also.

Leading the charge on September 2 is Craftopia, an ID@Xbox game about living on a small island by hanging out, fighting bosses, crafting items, really whatever you want. Or if you want to try out something completely different, Final Fantasy 13 is also heading to Xbox Game Pass for both console and PC.

Square Enix’s RPG has something of a mixed reputation, but it’s undeniably one of the best-looking Final Fantasy games even over a decade after it was first released in 2009. There are also new indie releases coming out day-and-date this month including Surgeon Simulator 2 and The Artful Escape.

What's Coming to Xbox Game Pass in September 2021

• Craftopia (Cloud, Console, and PC) ID@Xbox – September 2

• Final Fantasy XIII (Console and PC) – September 2

• Signs of the Sojourner (Cloud, Console, and PC) – September 2

• Surgeon Simulator 2 (Cloud, Console, and PC) ID@Xbox – September 2

• Crown Trick (Console and PC) ID@Xbox – September 7

• Breathedge (Cloud, Console, and PC) ID@Xbox – September 9

• Nuclear Throne (Console and PC) ID@Xbox – September 9

• The Artful Escape (Console and PC) ID@Xbox -September 9

Here's What's Leaving Xbox Game Pass in September 2021

• Red Dead Online (Cloud and Console) – September 13

• Company of Heroes 2 (PC) – September 15

• Disgaea 4 (PC) – September 15

• Forza Motorsport 7 (Cloud, Console, and PC) – September 15

• Hotshot Racing (Cloud and Console) – September 15

• The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics (Cloud, Console, and PC) – September 15

• Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales (Cloud and Console) – September 15

If you missed it, a bunch of Quake games including the newly announced Quake Remaster also went up on Xbox Game Pass in August. The collection was announced at, where else? Quakecon.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

In the fourth episode of Marvel’s What If…? series on Disney+ titled “What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?” we find out what happens when Stephen Strange loses the love of his life, Doctor Christine Palmer, and goes on a grief-fueled hunt for the magic to bring her back.

One of the key players in the episode is the mysterious O-Bengh, who claims to be the librarian for the books of Cagliostro. But who is Sorcerer Cagliostro and what’s his backstory? The episode does not tell us outright, but a few lines of dialogue tie into lore from the comics and may offer an answer.

Warning: full spoilers for What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?!

Who Is Sorcerer Cagliostro?

When Doctor Strange finds the location of the Lost Library of Cagliostro, he meets a mysterious man who stands guard over it. Assuming the obvious, Strange straight up asks if he is Cagliostro, but the man says he is named O-Bengh, librarian for the Books of Cagliostro. However, in the comics O-Bengh is supposedly the real name of Cagliostro.

In the comics, the man who would become Cagliostro was thought to have started out as O-Bengh, ruler of a kingdom in India way back in 1000 A.D. After an encounter with a time-traveling Doctor Doom, O-Bengh became obsessed with time travel and began his quest for immortal life–and he found it using everything from the dark magic of the Darkhold to vampire blood.

Over the course of his long life, O-Bengh made a habit of killing men and taking their names as his own. In 1500 A.D. he killed and reasserted himself as a powerful Egyptian sorcerer named Al-Tothas, and as Al-Tothas he had his first of many run-ins with another immortal, Dracula. In the 1700s, O-Bengh took the life of his apprentice Giuseppe Balsamo and assumed his identity, including Balsamo’s marriage to wife Lorenza. It was then that O-Bengh reinvented himself as an advisor to King Louis XVI and took on the name that would go on to become that of legend, Cagliostro.

Eventually Dracula got his revenge on Cagliostro when Lorenza was turned into a vampire and Cagliostro was forced to stake her. After suffering that loss, Cagliostro combined everything he knew about attaining eternal life into the Book of Cagliostro.

There are many parallels to be drawn between O-Bengh in the comics and the MCU that all but confirm O-Bengh is indeed Cagliostro. O-Bengh in the comics changed his name several times, so MCU O-Bengh may have done the same. Perhaps he went by Cagliostro at one point but decided to give up that name, which is why he “lied” to Strange about his identity. When Doctor Strange asks where he can find Sorcerer Cagliostro, O-Bengh cryptically replies, “Well, maybe here. Maybe there. Maybe nowhere.” which could be a hint that he may have been Cagliostro at one point but no longer.

While O-Bengh doesn’t divulge his backstory in the episode, he does impart some wisdom from his own life to Strange about how devotion to love can make one delusional and how having your heart broken can also shatter your mind. That certainly sounds like the advice of someone who found love, lost it, and went on a fruitless quest to try and get it back, hinting that O-Bengh’s tragic backstory from the comics where he was forced to kill his wife Lorenza is also MCU canon.

We’re left to fill in the rest of the gaps about O-Bengh with speculation. Perhaps after losing his wife, O-Bengh built a library and filled it with books about the magic he learned over his unnaturally long life. He stood guard over the library and granted Doctor Strange access, hoping to teach him lessons about life, love, and death so that his own mistakes would not be not repeated.

O-Bengh’s parting words to Doctor Strange before dying of old age were, “Even in our world, death is part of the plan.” But while Doctor Strange heard the words, he didn’t listen to them. He went on to harvest too much dark magic from various creatures (and his own self) and though he was able to use it to break an absolute point in time and briefly restore Christine to life, it cost him his entire universe. If only he had listened to O-Bengh.

For more on Episode 4 of Marvel’s What If…?, be sure to check out our review of What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands? And don’t miss our deep dives on the other episodes of What If…? featuring evil Hank Pym and good guy Thanos.

Stephen Ddungu didn't know much about TikTok at all when a clip of his upcoming game project, Sword of Symphony, started circulating on the video platform last month.

A clip of a young boy attacking an enemy using musical combos that Ddungu had previously posted on other social channels was reposted on TikTok by an account called @gamedevblaster on August 2. As of the publication of this piece, it has gotten over 335,000 views, and the comments are full of praise and excitement.

Ddungu tells me he was alerted to the sudden popularity of his clip by a friend, so he made an account and posted his own video, introducing himself to his newly-found fans. That video has now been watched 1.6 million times, and a second follow-up he posted later has been seen nearly 3 million times.

"It's crazy how fast stuff gets out there and gets popular so quickly on TikTok," Ddungu says. "And just the kind of things that get popular; weird things get so many views. Other people are working for content and only get a few views here, and then you get someone doing a random, weird-looking dance and it's getting millions of views. I guess people like what people like."

Ddungu has always been a musician, and loves to both play and compose. He has a music channel on YouTube where he posts orchestral covers of video game songs, and its success directly led to his eventual work on Sword of Symphony.

In 2018, Ddungu's channel reached 1000 subscribers, and he wanted to do something special to celebrate the milestone. So he made an animation to go with his latest composition, despite never having animated anything before. He admits that this first foray into animation wasn't incredible, but he enjoyed the process of experimenting in the new medium. And he got a lot of constructive feedback on his work, inspiring him to do better. So Ddungu kept working at it.

"All my decisions are down to me just believing that I can do it," he says. "Just jumping in and making the leap, because you never really know the extent of your potential unless you dive in. And then you surprise yourself."

Ddungu took his newfound interest in animation to incredible lengths. He worked on it alongside his school studies in music technology, and eventually made his own animation project called Purpose: VERSA, inspired by game series he loved like Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, and Nier. Then, once again, as he was working on one type of project, a new idea manifested itself. What if he used a different medium to support his existing animation work? So he started dabbling in game creation through Blender, and eventually spun off Purpose: VERSA into an action-RPG video game project, called Purpose: VERSUS.

But as hard as Ddungu worked on all of this, his timing was off. He finished a cinematic trailer for Purpose: VERSUS just before he was given his final school assignment, and thus wasn't able to turn that in. So he started sketching out Sword of Symphony, a little game idea he had about using music as magic.

"I wanted to just do something small, like a little prototype that was just a hand-in assignment and then forget about it," he says. "I was about to scrap the project afterwards, because there was no need for it."

But then, Ddungu made a social media page for Sword of Symphony, which he connected to the existing accounts for Purpose VERSA — just to let people who had been interested in his other work know that he was still working on projects. Unexpectedly, Sword of Symphony began gaining traction much, much faster than either of the Purpose titles.

So Ddungu kept uploading new footage as he went. When he reached 1000 followers, he decided he'd write a story for Sword of Symphony instead of limiting it to the combat prototype. Interest only kept growing.

Though Ddungu originally started Sword of Symphony in 2020, he had to rush his work on it to make school deadlines. So in June of this year, spurred on by the project's popularity and conversations he'd already had with potential publishers, he scrapped the entire thing and started from scratch. Now, Sword of Symphony is four to five years away (though hopefully sooner, he says), but it has a clear direction.

The original pitch for Sword of Symphony was a game where you fight with the power of music, and that's still the case. Now, though, it follows the story of a young man named Stefān, a wielder of musical magic, who lives in a magical world called Sonata styled after 18th century London. Stefān is a member of a group of genius detectives who are hired by a royal council to solve musical mysteries, many of which Ddungu says will subtly teach music theory as players try to solve them.

Ddungu is tight-lipped about much else, as Sword of Symphony is still so early in development, so it's not quite clear how the combat factors in just yet. But factor in it does, with the musical combos shown off in Ddungu's TikToks functioning a bit like "rhythmic phrases," where you can do more damage to enemies by tapping buttons in time with the rhythm of the combo.

He also tells me about a group of friends he's a part of that calls itself the "Inner Circle." The group consists of seven creatives all working on projects they hope to link together, crossover, and cross-promote once they're ready to launch them. Ddungu says he's invested in not just the success of his own project, but the success of the group — he wants them to thrive together.

TikTok success hasn't changed much for Ddungu, he says, though he acknowledges a lot more people now know about the game than he expected. He runs a Discord for Sword of Symphony, that he says got around 800 new members on the day his TikTok blew up, and then around 400 the following day. He ran it alone at the time, so for a while he was struggling to approve all the new members individually, and eventually had to ask a friend for support. He expects that things like Discord community management and social media management will now take up more of his time, which he thinks will force him to develop better time management skills.

"It's actually good, in the sense of character development, learning new things…getting into this system of being a better person," Ddungu says. "I'm happy that this has come from something that I love doing. What I love doing is teaching me to be a better person."

With school completed and a new project beloved by a growing community, Ddungu is now committed to making games. He reiterates to me his earlier comment about how he — and anyone — never know what skills they might possess until they dive in and try, which can often result in discovering hidden, unexpected talents and passions.

"You've got to focus and put in the effort and the work and hustle and stuff, even if it means sacrifices here and there, but it's really like a test of strength," he says. "That kind of lets you know whether this is for you or not…But once you dive in, if you feel that you're inclined to be committed despite the sacrifices, that's when you know it's for you. I've tried other things in the past but never really got that [feeling] but with [Sword of Symphony], I know that this is something I want to do long term. I feel so encouraged right now."

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

This article was amended after publication to correctly identify Ddungu's field of study as music technology.

All nine seasons of Seinfeld will be available to stream on Netflix on October 1 — and in 4K. This will mark the first time that every episode of the NBC series will be available to stream on a single service globally.

To accompany the announcement, Netflix released a video on Twitter touting the show's arrival on the streamer as a "180 episode premiere."

All 180 episodes of Seinfeld hit Netflix on October 1 pic.twitter.com/H73RZvNUw9

— Netflix (@netflix) September 1, 2021

“[Seinfeld co-creator] Larry [David] and I are enormously grateful to Netflix for taking this chance on us. It takes a lot of guts to trust two schmucks who literally had zero experience in television when we made this thing,” said Jerry Seinfeld in a press release. “We really got carried away, I guess. I didn’t realize we made so many of them. Hope to recoup god knows how many millions it must have taken to do. But worth all the work if people like it. Crazy project.”

Netflix acquired the rights to stream Seinfeld in 2019. Hulu had held the exclusive streaming rights to Seinfeld until last June. This new deal will see Netflix house the NBC sitcom for five years. While financial details of the agreement were not disclosed at the time, it was reported that Netflix paid "far more" than $500 million — the total that NBCUniversal paid to bring The Office to Peacock.

"This is the first time we’ve taken a risk of this nature, going all in on 9 seasons at the jump. But Jerry has created something special with this sitcom that nobody has ever done," Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in a statement.

In other Seinfeld news, a fan-designed LEGO set of Jerry Seinfeld's apartment in the show hit the market last month, complete with Minifigs of the show's main characters (and Newman). And if you really can't wait to see some Seinfeld on Netflix, Bee Movie is currently available to watch on the streaming service in the US.

J. Kim Murphy is a freelance entertainment writer.