Can Clutch succeed where racing games have traditionally played it safe?
That’s one of the questions at the center of a new GamesBeat Creators interview featuring Garard Williams, who goes by HipHopGamer, and Mike Brown, founder of Maverick Games and creative director of Clutch. Brown spent years helping shape the Forza franchise, one of the most successful racing series in gaming, before leaving to build a new studio and pursue ideas he felt couldn’t fit within Forza’s established formula.
When HipHopGamer asked whether Clutch contains ideas he wanted to bring to Forza but couldn’t, Brown didn’t hesitate.
“It’s exactly that,” Brown said. “That’s the exact reason that I wanted to leave and set this up. Forza is great, it has a great formula. It’s a formula that works, it’s a formula that keeps making a ton of money. Xbox are probably right to try and protect that formula and keep it doing what it’s doing.”
Brown said he still loves the franchise, but he wanted the freedom to experiment with new concepts that required starting from scratch rather than working within an existing framework.
The interview is part of GamesBeat Creators, a partnership between GamesBeat and creators like HipHopGamer that highlights conversations with influential voices across gaming, entertainment and technology.
For Brown, Clutch represents an opportunity to take risks and push the racing genre in directions he couldn’t pursue before.
“I had ideas to do some of the stuff that I thought could be different and maybe bigger,” Brown said. “That’s what led us to this. That’s what I wanted to do with Maverick Games, and that’s what we did with Clutch. I love Forza as much as you do. It is a great game, it has a winning formula, but there’s stuff in here that you’re just never going to see in Forza. We had to leave and go start a new thing so we could bring that to the world.”
The conversation offers an early look at the thinking behind Clutch and the ambition driving Maverick Games as it seeks to make its mark in a genre dominated by long-running franchises. Whether Clutch can disrupt the racing landscape remains to be seen, but Brown makes it clear that building something different was the goal from day one.