He Made Forza Horizon 5, Now He's Building Its Rival

Mike Brown spent years as creative director on Forza Horizon 5, one of the highest-rated racing games of the last decade. Now he's running Maverick Games, and his studio just pulled the curtain back on Clutch, an open-world racer that looks engineered to go toe-to-toe with the very franchise he left behind.

Clutch follows a pair of sibling racing prodigies splitting their time between the R1K, a prestigious professional circuit, and the Midnight Collective, an underground street racing scene. That dual structure will sound familiar to anyone who's played a Horizon game, but Maverick is leaning harder into narrative with heist-style set pieces, police chases, and gadgets like a grappling hook that lets you whip around hairpins at full speed. According to the reveal video, the game is targeting a spring 2027 launch on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, with a proper trailer debuting at Summer Game Fest this Friday.

What caught my attention most is the customisation. Forza Horizon 6 has been out for a bit now, and one of its most persistent criticisms is how shallow its visual car tweaks are. A modder called Smidgeee literally had to build interior customisation into Horizon 6 themselves because Playground didn't ship it. Clutch is positioning interior personalisation as a headline feature: cup holders, dashboard clutter, mirror baubles, seat materials. Brown told IGN that making cars feel like real-world vehicles people actually live in was a priority. I love that framing. Racing games have obsessed over exterior fidelity for years while leaving interiors feeling like sterile showrooms.

Brown going from building Forza Horizon to directly competing with it is one of the more compelling storylines in racing games right now. Playground's series is the undisputed king of the arcade open-world racer, and nobody has seriously challenged it since the Need for Speed series found its footing again with Unbound. Clutch launching into that gap with a former Horizon director at the wheel gives it instant credibility, but credibility and execution are very different things. Friday's Summer Game Fest showing should tell us whether this is a real contender or just a strong pitch.