Maverick Games just showed the world sixty minutes of its upcoming open-world racer Clutch, a game that won’t launch until spring 2026 and doesn’t currently have a publisher backing it. That’s either supreme confidence or a very public audition tape.
Creative Director Mike Brown, who previously helmed Forza Horizon, acknowledged the footage was being shown far earlier than he’d normally be comfortable with. “I think for us, and the games we might have shown you in a past life, this is very, very, very early,” Brown said during the stream. Amazon walked away from its publishing deal with Maverick back in February, and this kind of raw, extensive gameplay reveal reads like a studio putting its best foot forward for potential suitors.
The footage starts at the literal beginning of the game’s story, which opens with the protagonists behind the wheel of a Fiat Multipla. Not exactly your typical racing game power fantasy. A personal tragedy propels the main character, Theo, into the world of the Riviera R1K championship and the underground street racing scene that orbits around it.
Those two racing modes work differently. The R1K is traditional closed-circuit competition. Street races, though, aren’t won by crossing the finish line first.
Instead, they’re scored by driving with style while satisfying requests from fans on a fictional livestream. A viewer tells Theo to drift, he drifts, and the points roll in. It borrows from the trick-scoring DNA of Project Gotham Racing and Burnout, wrapped in a social media skin that sounds groan-worthy on paper but could work if the driving mechanics are tight enough.
The car roster is deliberately eclectic. A winged E39 BMW M5 runs wheel-to-wheel with late-model Aston Martin Vantages and Porsche 718 Caymans. Older cars are purchased through underground meets, while newer ones come from dealerships.
Maverick clearly isn’t chasing the hypercar-only fantasy that dominates most racing titles. There’s an extended sequence in a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon, which tells you everything about the studio’s philosophy.
Small details reveal a team that obsesses over texture. Switch camera views and the perspective physically travels through the car’s interior rather than hard-cutting between angles, a trick borrowed from Colin McRae Dirt. Players can use turn signals and toggle between high and low beams, which apparently affect surrounding traffic.
Then there’s the harpoon. Maverick previously revealed a grappling mechanic that lets players slingshot around corners at impossible speeds. The stream confirmed five additional vehicle technologies in the same vein, though the studio kept those under wraps.
It’s a departure from simulation, and it signals Clutch wants to occupy a space somewhere between arcade chaos and narrative-driven racing that doesn’t really exist right now. The open-world map got a brief aerial reveal, anchored by a 1:1 recreation of Monaco and the surrounding Riviera landscape. Monaco is tiny in real life, so the broader environment will need to carry that open-world promise.
Built in Unreal Engine with proprietary sky-capture technology feeding into Epic’s Lumen lighting system, the visuals looked striking even through a compressed livestream. Car models and character renders held up under extended scrutiny, which is notable for a game its own creators call early.
The real tension here isn’t whether Clutch looks good. It does. The tension is whether a studio without a publisher can sustain the momentum long enough to ship a game this ambitious.
Maverick is betting that showing everything early builds enough excitement to attract the right partner. That’s a gamble Forza Horizon veterans probably wouldn’t have needed to make five years ago, but the landscape has shifted. Studios with pedigree don’t automatically get blank checks anymore. They get livestreams and crossed fingers.
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