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Carny Island: News

By Brett Clements

via Media Man Group

Carny Island

Brett Clements

Carny Island: File 02 / The human in the machine: Brett Clements

Carny Island YouTube

carny.island: LinkedIn Newsletter: A Maniac & Two Machines

Carny Island: LinkTree

Brett Clements is an Australian artist, writer, filmmaker, and game designer best known as the creator of the cult hybrid video board game franchise Nightmare / ATMOSFEAR (which sold over 4 million units).

Carny Island Overview

• Concept: Carny Island is a hybrid video board game and digital experience that mixes physical tabletop play with mobile phones used as interactive entertainment portals.
• Gameplay: Players scavenge graves for body parts and loot to build their own Frankenstein-style creation while trying to survive characters like Uncle Shrift.
• Production Team: Developed alongside the team at Mongril Labs, with AI tools supporting coding, testing, and production, and a reunion with former Roadshow Entertainment president Milt Barlow for global licensing.
• Engine/Media: Built using development transitions into Godot, documented via regular dev logs and updates on the Carny Island Official Website and Carny Island YouTube Channel.
Background & Career
• Media & Television: A multi-decade veteran across Australian television, network advertising, and journalism, having worked on projects like Simon Townsend's Wonder World! and A Couple 'A Cowboys.
• Other Projects: Involved in producing and directing various digital, real-estate, and documentary ventures, including the guerrilla-shot docu-series SQUAD.
• Online Profiles: You can follow his ongoing production logs via Brett Clements' Portfolio or his LinkedIn Newsletter

Linked In: Newsletter

Making Carny Island ##2

June 29, 2026

I’m Not Building a Game with AI. I’m Building a Studio.
Straight up.

I hear all the concerns about AI. The warnings. The predictions that we’ll carpet the Earth, oceans and even space with data centres to build a super-intelligence that replaces us all.

Maybe.

I don’t know.

History has taught me that the future is rarely as bad as we fear, and never quite as good as we imagine.

What I do know is this.

Without AI, Carny Island would never exist.

Not because AI invented it.

Because it gave me a way to build it.

For ten years I’ve been drawing Carny Island.

Every rule.

Every location.

Every character.

Every mechanic.

Thousands of illustrations. Every one of them drawn by hand in Adobe Fresco as vector artwork.

I spent days drawing a patch of grass until it felt right.

Then I imported it into the game…

…and drew it all again.

That’s game development.

The commercial reality is brutal.

Nobody funds an idea anymore.

They fund a vertical slice.

A polished section of the game that proves you can actually build the whole thing.

No slice.

No deal.

I was quoted around $150,000 and ten months to build one.

I haven’t got $150,000.

So instead of making a slice…

…I’m making the whole pie.

Uncle Shrift's
Carny Island Video Board Game Updates

Carny Island is a Video Board Game which uses mobile phones as playing pieces and portals combined with a specially designed app. Based on art and ideas 10 years in the making, it also features optional 3D printing of playing surfaces and 'squares' to make up giant boards. Clements is designing the experience for the ultimate Halloween party.

Carny Island. Crookwood. Single player mode is targeting release on iPhone as soon as possible, around mid-November 2026.

An iPad version will follow soon after, then a Chinese version.

Kickstarter is planned for April 2027 to fund local networking challenges and an Android version, leading to the Video Board Game launch for Halloween 2027.

No Rock Stars

By Brett Clements

carny.island

July 3, 2026

...there's this mortician who's a closet cannibal and a 3-foot grave robber...

Did I tell you I'm building a games studio.

Yeah, right.

What's that?

Most people imagine a few programmers fuelled by pizza, energy drinks and beanbags.

The reality is closer to building a city.

The biggest games studio on Earth is Rockstar Games.

Right now, around 7,500 people spread across eleven studios are trying to finish a single game: Grand Theft Auto VI. It has taken more than a decade. The budget is believed to have climbed beyond a billion dollars. The project has survived one of the biggest hacks in entertainment history, multiple delays, crunch allegations, union disputes and the threat of industrial action.

GTA VI — The Most Expensive, Most Troubled, Most Anticipated Game Ever Made

Thirteen years between mainline releases. November 19, 2026, is the target.

Whether it holds is still not certain—because right now, the people making it are threatening to strike.

The Scale Is Genuinely Incomprehensible

Rockstar India leads with 1,615 specialists, surpassing even the legendary Rockstar North in Edinburgh, which has 1,285. Rockstar Lincoln contributes 910, New York 750. The remaining divisions—Toronto, San Diego, Leeds, London, New England and Dundee—support various aspects of development.

For context, a typical AAA game uses 200–400 people. Rockstar has deployed a small army across a dozen time zones, passing work around the clock like a factory that never sleeps.

The budget has almost certainly crossed $1 billion, making it the most expensive video game ever made. The full number, including marketing and long-term costs, is likely $1.5 to $2 billion or more. Exact figures will probably never be confirmed publicly. GTA V cost roughly $265 million in 2013. GTA VI is at least six times more expensive.

Rockstar North UK tax filings revealed staff costs alone exceeded £2.14 billion—around $2.7 to $3 billion—between 2019 and 2025. That's just salaries. At one studio. Over six years.

The Hack That Changed Everything

On September 18, 2022, a new user on GTAForums called "teapotuberhacker" posted download links to over 90 files from the next Grand Theft Auto game. The leak spread across the internet in a single day, with news outlets calling it one of the biggest leaks in video game history.

A British jury later convicted Arion Kurtaj—a member of the Lapsus$ hacking gang—for the breach. The judge ruled Kurtaj should be placed in a secure hospital until mental health professionals decided he no longer posed a risk. Doctors had deemed Kurtaj, who is severely autistic, unfit to stand trial.

The teenager who caused potentially hundreds of millions in damage and years of workflow disruption to the world's most secretive game studio is now in a hospital. In March 2026, reports emerged that Kurtaj had allegedly been smuggled a phone into hospital and was asking whether GTA VI's source code had leaked yet—apparently believing someone was still holding it.

The Crunch That Never Ended

For Red Dead Redemption 2—the game before this one—Rockstar was notorious for brutal crunch: over 60- to 80-hour work weeks, mandatory overtime, pressure to show up on weekends, and constant iteration that meant trashing previous work. Multiple accounts described it as standard practice, not the exception.

Rockstar promised it would change.

It didn't.

Three members of the Rockstar Games Workers Union, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal, accused the studio of crunch being built directly into employment contracts.

"Crunch is prevalent enough that the company built into our contracts, as standard, an opt-out of the Working Time Regulations that stops your employer being able to ask you to do more than about 10 hours extra each week," said one employee.

Read that again.

The opt-out of legal overtime protection is the default.

Workers have to actively fight to reclaim their right not to be worked into the ground.

Workers also described a bonus system used as a control mechanism.

"When the bonus is particularly good it can be a windfall, but often the bonus is disappointing and one can end up being paid considerably less than expected for the year."

There are gender pay-gap allegations.

There are accusations of pay transparency being deliberately obscured.

The Firings and the Fight

In October 2025, Rockstar fired more than 30 staff at its Edinburgh headquarters for what the company called "gross misconduct", claiming employees had discussed confidential information in a public forum.

The union says they were sacked for union activity. The case went to an employment tribunal. Rockstar lost a legal battle, meaning fired unionised workers can continue to bring blacklisting claims against the studio. The final tribunal is set to conclude in mid-October 2026—one month before GTA VI releases.

Now, right now, as the game enters final crunch, developers are threatening to go on strike. If they strike during this critical crunch period, GTA VI could be delayed again or launch with bugs and glitches, ruining the rollout of this industry behemoth.

The Delays

GTA VI was announced in February 2022 and originally scheduled for late 2025. It was pushed first to May 26, 2026, then to the current date of November 19, 2026. Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two, cited "limited circumstances where more time was required to polish a title."

Two delays.

Five years since announcement.

Thirteen years since the last game.

After the second delay, a Rockstar North employee said morale was "at rock bottom." Take-Two's stock price briefly dropped almost 10%.

What It's Supposed to Make

GTA VI is projected to generate $7.6 billion in revenue in its first two months alone. Analysts think it could sell 20 million copies in a single day. Pre-orders went live on June 25, and the physical edition sold out on Amazon within an hour.

The entire modern games industry has essentially restructured around this one release. Other publishers moved their release dates.

Rockstar isn't failing.

It's attempting something almost nobody else on Earth can.

The biggest entertainment production ever assembled.

And it's doing it at precisely the moment the games industry is eating itself alive.

Matthew Ball's State of Video Gaming 2026 is 164 pages of uncomfortable reading. It has become required reading for publishers, investors and anyone serious about understanding where games are heading.

Global video game revenue reached almost US$196 billion last year.

A record.

Then you turn the page.

Forty-four thousand jobs disappeared.

Studios closed.

Projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars were abandoned.

Investment collapsed.

Players began spending more of their time on TikTok, sports betting, AI and every other platform fighting for the same twenty-four hours in the day.

The games industry has never made more money.

The business of making games has rarely looked more fragile.

Ball's conclusion is brutally simple.

There isn't one games industry anymore.

There are many.

At one end are companies capable of making billion-dollar bets.

At the other are thousands of independent developers trying to survive while more than 18,000 new games arrive on Steam every year.

The numbers are staggering.

In 2025, app stores saw 5,244 new releases in a single 24-hour snapshot. Apple's App Store listed 2.42 million apps and games in 2025, while Google Play had 1.58 million available.

On Google Play alone, approximately 10,000 fresh applications launch every week — around 1,000 apps daily, 40,000 monthly. In September 2024 alone, approximately 29,000 new mobile apps were released through Google Play.

That's roughly 500,000 new apps and games per year across both major stores combined. Of those, games represent the single largest category — about 13.8% of all listings — meaning somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 new mobile games launch every year.

New mobile app and game releases nearly doubled between Q1 2024 and Q1 2026. AI-assisted development is the obvious accelerant. The flood is getting faster.

The Brutal Survival Reality

The average app loses 70% of its users within the first 30 days of installation.

Games generate nearly half of all app revenue on less than one-third of total downloads — roughly 75-80% of all consumer spending on Google Play, despite games representing only about 13.8% of the platform's total apps.

Which means the money is extraordinarily concentrated. Thousands of games launch every month. The same handful of titles — Candy Crush, Royal Match, PUBG Mobile, Roblox, Coin Master — absorb the overwhelming majority of spending. The rest are background noise.

Stricter 2025 developer policies mean only high-retention, 4.5-star-rated apps survive the discovery algorithm. You don't just need to be good. You need to be immediately, measurably, algorithmically good — or you disappear before anyone finds you.

The One Line That Says Everything

Downloads grew only 0.8% year over year in 2025, while app revenue rose 10.6%.

The market isn't growing. The same players are just spending more. New entrants are fighting over scraps while the incumbents compound. And the number of new games released keeps accelerating — driven by AI tools lowering the barrier to creation — which makes discovery exponentially harder for everyone without a marketing machine or existing audience.

50,000+ new mobile games a year. Five games hold the spending.

That's where I come in.

Clearly fucking deluded.

I don't have 7,500 people.

I don't have investors.

I certainly don't have a billion dollars.

What I do have is one extraordinarily supportive wife. Two iPads running Adobe Fresco. An M5 MacBook Pro. A Mac Studio. Ten years of hand-drawn artwork. More than 500 pages defining every rule, every character and every mechanic of Carny Island.

And a world that occasionally makes AI stop and wonder what the hell it's looking at. My name would have to be on a lot of red flags and a couple of banners by now.

Which brings me to the studio I'm actually building.

There's Uncle Shrift.

He's the local mortician.

He's also a closet cannibal.

He eats people before he buries them, which is disappointing if you're a grave robber.

Then there's The Villain.

Three feet of trouble.

He sneaks into Crookwood Cemetery under the cover of darkness and steals body parts before sunrise.

The cemetery itself is built from timber, chicken wire, sandstone and papier-mâché. The trees change colour with the New York seasons. The wind follows New York's weather. The graves creak. The dead don't always stay dead. And every single part of that world has to be designed, illustrated, animated and coded before anyone gets to play it.

So yes.

I am.

Clearly.

Deluded.

But I have a mate called Fable.

It's not the Microsoft game.

Brett Clements has spent more than forty years turning stories into pictures, productions and playable systems. He began as a teenage newspaper journalist, became a filmmaker on Simon Townsend's Wonder World!, built television and tourism campaigns, and co-founded A Couple 'A Cowboys.

Brett's previous games include Oz Quiz, BRIT QUIZ, DARE, The Truth Hurts and Rap Rat. He created The Gatekeeper and brought Baron Samedi, Anne De Chantraine, Elizabeth Bathory and the Soul Rangers to life under Nightmare/ATMOSFEAR before leaving Cowboys.

Brett does not treat film as decoration around a game. He uses framing, editing, performance, suspense, direct address and genre memory as parts of the rules. Carny Island draws on gangster films, slashers, funeral theatre, cartoons, live sport, news broadcasts, rock performance and audience participation, then fuses them into one playable show.

Mongril Labs is the team building Carny Island. Brett Clements created the world and its artwork; together we are turning that vision into a game, with AI supporting coding, testing and production.

Mdia Man

Interview

Brett Clements

CageRace Newsletter (LinkedIn)

By Brett Clements

CageRace (often styled as Cage Race) is an emerging extreme swimming competition format, described as the "World Series of Extreme Swimming." It's an athlete-led initiative, primarily in Australia, that reimagines competitive swimming for TV/screen appeal with high-energy, close-contact racing in narrow water strips (like pools or channels). cagerace.com

Key Features

Format: Races involve multiple rounds (not traditional "laps") in a confined space for intense, head-to-head action. Events include men vs. women matchups, with a focus on spectacle, supersuits, and dramatic finishes. The only core rule emphasizes raw competition in wild/close-contact water. cagerace.comEvents: Test races and pilots have run on the Gold Coast (a popular swimming hotspot in Australia).

Cage Race II – TORRENT (February 2026) featured Olympians and explored new independent race formats to boost audience engagement for the sport. swimswam.com

Plans for a broader "World Series," grassroots events, and even Masters categories (30+ with qualifying times).

Style: Built for visuals — "hot laps," dramatic aerial shots, mid-air catches, and propulsion analysis (e.g., via tech like eo SwimBETTER). It's positioned as swimming "for the screen" rather than just the pool, with potential for TV series elements.

youtube.com

Team & Vision: Co-created by race director Ed Anderson.

Involves Olympians (e.g., dual Olympian David Morgan as co-commentator), swimmers, and production crews. They're developing AI-designed "SuperSuits," seeking sponsors, and encouraging local events. cagerace.comHow to Get InvolvedVisit cagerace.com for rules, supersuits info, videos, news, and registration (for competing, supporting, sponsoring, or hosting a local CageRace).

They’re building it grassroots-style: anyone can help stage events in narrow water strips, even backyard pools.

It’s still developing (with Indiegogo-style crowdfunding vibes and teasers circulating), but it’s gaining traction among swimmers and extreme sports fans in Australia, especially on the Gold Coast. If you’re into swimming, motorsport-style racing energy, or new action sports, it’s worth checking out their site or Instagram/YouTube teasers for the high-flying, intense footage.

CageRace Newsletter (LinkedIn)

The WWE of Swimming

By Brett Clements

April 29, 2026

There’s a strange imbalance in global sport.

One athlete breaks a world record and earns around $10,000.

Another steps into a ring and earns $10 million a year.

Both train relentlessly. Both perform under pressure.

Only one is built for the screen.

Cam McEvoy is one of the fastest swimmers in history.

Olympic gold across multiple Games. A 50m freestyle world record — 20.88.

At the meet where that record was set, the reward was standard prize money. No bonus for the record.

Across an entire Olympic career, medal bonuses in Australia accumulate to low six figures.

That’s not outrage.

That’s a structural clue.

Because in another arena, the model is different.

WWE doesn’t sell competition.

It sells engagement.

Roman Reigns operates in the $12–15 million range annually. Brock Lesnar commands eight figures. Dwayne Johnson can generate $10–20 million for a single appearance.

Not because it’s competitive.

Because it’s compelling.

WWE understood something traditional sport still resists:

People don’t just watch performance.?They watch meaning.

Rivalries. Consequences. Characters. Weekly rhythm.

Swimming already has the hardest part solved.

The athletes are real. The performance is real. The outcomes are measurable.

What it lacks is translation.

CAGERACE
CageRace.com is the platform.

A screen-first swimming property built for audiences, not stopwatches.

FORMULA H2O
Formula H2O is the system that powers it.

A repeatable competition format designed for broadcast.

It defines how races run, how rules are applied, and how moments become story.

At the centre—

Ed Anderson. On the deck.

Not in a booth.

Poolside. Inside the action.

Commentator and referee.

He doesn’t wait for decisions.

He makes them, explains them, and frames them in real time.

A loose arm that results in a head clip. Penalty. Sledging on the 'walkback'. Let it slide.

It’s seen. Purple Card. Called. Interpreted immediately.

The audience doesn’t wait for a ruling.

They experience it.

And when something sits on the edge—

it doesn’t disappear.

It escalates.

48 to 72 hours later, the footage from 14 x 360 degree underwater cameras and drones, edited.

Review. Tribunal. Debate.

The decision becomes content.

The ruling becomes a turning point.

Alongside him— a female co-commentator.

Not duplicating his role. Expanding it.

Where Ed defines the rules— she brings the human dimension.

Pressure. Psychology. Consequence.

Together:

Authority and perspective.

One continuous conversation the audience can follow.

Traditional sport splits this apart.

Referee. Commentator. Analyst.

Different voices. Different timings.

CageRace collapses it.

One system. One narrative thread.

Wrestling figured this out years ago.

The announcer didn’t just describe the action.

He explained the world.

That’s the shift.

THE REAL PLAY
Swimming doesn’t need to become wrestling.

It needs to become watchable at scale.

Right now, one of the most physically demanding sports on earth is being packaged like a spreadsheet.

And spreadsheets don’t scale.

Stories do.

THE QUESTION
What happens when a race isn’t just a result…

…but an episode?

What happens when a ruling isn’t just a decision…

…but a turning point?

CageRace.com?Powered by Formula H2O.

The athletes don’t need to change.

The product does.

CageRace Newsletter (LinkedIn)

Athletes' Ownership Of Content

By Brett Clements

May 6, 2026

How we will change a boring sport and make CageRacers $$$$.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

We shot TORRENT in the pouring rain on an iPhone.

But the shift isn’t just in production.

It's in Ownership.

Part of our model is teaching our competitors how to use these devices to generate professional user-generated content — not AI slop, but real, authored material.

We use AI, but we use it deliberately.

For artist impressions
For storyboards
To visualise what we’re not allowed to film

Nine owns the broadcast rights to the official events. That’s fine. Most people aren’t paying $25 at the gate to watch athletes they don’t know swim laps anyway.

So we build our own world.

We use tools like Midjourney to create stadiums full of people — because right now, we’re not allowed to film them.

We use AI to build living portfolios for our athletes — updated poolside, voice-to-text, in real time:

Training diaries
Personal reflections
Photos
Video

All owned by the athlete.

Because here’s the truth:

Water is a medium AI cannot replicate. It’s 800 times denser than air. Put elite athletes into it and you get something raw, unpredictable, and human.

Live sport is one of the last environments AI cannot fake.

It can understand emotion. It will never feel it.

And if you can capture that — and build a model around it that sustains itself through sponsorship, crowd funding, and the emerging “brands as studios” approach — you don’t need a free-to-air network to legitimise it.

Life finds a way.

The old social media pathway — where 13, 14, 15-year-old athletes could build an audience — is closing, legally and structurally.

So CageRace built its own ecosystem.

A year ago, that wouldn’t have been possible.

I know — I spent 20 years and a million dollars building something similar with Showcache.

AI has accelerated that thinking. It hasn’t replaced it.

It saw the structure. It extended it.

Because code isn’t the breakthrough. Thinking is.

CageRace.com is opening to advertising — but only for athletes. Monetising editorial is a slippery slope. We take 20% to keep the system running and to deploy the sales' teams. Then there's licensing the format internationally. To make money for the swimmers. That’s the cagerace.com model.

How are we going to deliver? We are delivering. With new platforms like OTT.

Have a look at CageRace.com on a smart TV. It is a start. By a start-up. Self-funded. Building from the ground up.

Then ask yourself:

Is this more interesting than watching five days of Test cricket?

Swimming As A Contact Sport

By Brett Clements

April 24, 2026

A very famous, legendary and awesome Australian coach asked me can swimmers "pull another competitor's foot" in this new "Cage" thing.

Could they fight in the pool?

Another athlete who's registered tells us he likes a blue. Even reckons he could do OK if he could get away with it. "Can I?"

CageRacing rules state you cannot "hold, grab or pull" to impede/slow the forward momentum of a Competitor. CageRacers will wear helmets similar to waterpolo players with ear protection, 'comms' and chipped for tracking for the drones; there are 14 x 360 degree 8K cameras underwater, rolling for the 20-minutes it takes to complete the 10 x 50m sprints and any 'challenges' like pull-ups between rounds.

Two cameras on two Commentators who are also referees. The whole race will be cut and screened to the competitors the following day which is when any "argy bargy" will be scrutinised and penalised by the Tribunal.