Everything a writer needs to cover Outright Mental and its work: facts, sources, and assets. Facts only — every claim below carries a link you can check.

Fact sheet

Studio	Outright Mental — an interactive entertainment skunkworks studio built on presence, candor, and the courage to face reality
Legal entity	Outright Mental Inc
Founder & President	Nick Charney Kaye
Based in	San Francisco, California, USA
Catalogue	A 25-year body of work, 2001–present (portfolio)
Six lines of work	One studio, six lines of work: original games; patented adaptive music (XJ); local-first conversation AI; skunkworks prototyping sprints; branded play; and licensed research IP
Flagship	Fever Tilt — a 1v1 zero-G arena sport, entering Steam Early Access July 2026 (fevertilt.com · Steam)
Patent	U.S. Patent 10,446,126 — generative music composition, assignee Outright Mental Inc
Press contact	press@outrightmental.com
Web	outrightmental.com
Downloads	Full press kit (ZIP)

About the studio

In one sentence. Outright Mental is a one-person interactive entertainment skunkworks studio in San Francisco that makes original games and experiences, holds a U.S. patent on generative music, and ships local-first AI products.

One paragraph, in the studio’s voice. We make original games and experiences that are sharp, strange, and deliberately human. We don’t try to be everything — we try to be fully present with one thing at a time, and take it as far as it will go. Systems that reveal character under pressure; mechanics that expose choice rather than hide it; satire with teeth. We’re not neutral. We’re not safe. We are sincere. (Read the full manifesto.)

The six vectors, one line. One studio, six lines of work: original games, patented adaptive music, local-first conversation AI, skunkworks prototyping sprints, branded play, and licensed research IP.

Founder

Long bioNick Charney Kaye founded Outright Mental and is the inventor named on U.S. Patent 10,446,126, the generative-music architecture behind the XJ music platform he designed and built — an open-source composer workstation and C++ runtime engine covered by Yahoo Finance, USA Today, LA Weekly, and Morningstar (see xjmusic.com). His earlier work spans interactive and film: he built and ran davidblaine.com across a roughly six-year relationship (the Drowned Alive site drew over a million unique visitors a day), co-directed a national U.S. Department of Justice PSA, and designed the Stetson “Made of America” platform. Today he directs the studio’s current slate — Fever Tilt, Conversation Simulator, Read The Room, Indie Game Analysis, and the Vibrator agentic build system. Contact and PGP: charneykaye.com.

Projects

• Fever Tilt — Zero-G Arena Sport. A ruthless 1v1 sport of exploitation & sabotage in zero-G: mine gems, weaponize drifting debris, race to score first. fevertilt.com · Steam · portfolio
• XJ music — Adaptive Music System. A patented system for continuous, never-repeating generative composition: open-source workstation, C++ engine, and brand. xjmusic.com · U.S. Patent 10,446,126 · portfolio
• Conversation Simulator — Local-First AI Practice. Rehearse interviews, negotiations, and hard conversations with AI characters that run 100% on your machine — no account, no cloud, no telemetry. conversationsimulator.com
• Read The Room — Relationship Pattern Reads. A private, structured report that names the relationship pattern you're stuck in and one grounded next move. readtheroom.fyi
• Vibrator — Self-Driving SDLC Factory. An open-source orchestrator that turns a GitHub issue queue into an autonomous implement-review-fix-merge factory. github.com/outrightmental/vibrator
• Indie Game Analysis — Data-Driven Games Research. 26 independent games compared across 35 standardized, sourced dimensions with shareable URLs. iga.outright.io

Credibility, with sources

• U.S. Patent 10,446,126 — generative music composition architecture. Granted October 15, 2019; assignee Outright Mental Inc; active to October 2038. Source: patents.google.com/patent/US10446126
• Maker Faire Bay Area — Editor's Choice, 2025, awarded to Fever Tilt. Source: fevertilt.com · studio portfolio
• Press coverage — the XJ music platform has been covered by Yahoo Finance, USA Today, LA Weekly, and Morningstar. Source: xjmusic.com
• National broadcast — the U.S. Department of Justice "Know Where They Go" PSA, co-directed by Nick Charney Kaye, aired nationally on NBC, CBS, Fox, and Oxygen in 2008. Source: studio portfolio
• David Blaine, Drowned Alive (2006) — the davidblaine.com relaunch drew over one million unique visitors a day during the stunt, held a ~10-minute average visit, and collected some 300,000 fan messages; the studio's relationship with the Blaine team ran roughly six years. Source: studio portfolio · davidblaine.com archive
• Physical-play origin — Fever Tilt was built on the 1v1 Coffee Table, a custom dual-screen station at Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco, and stress-tested through weekly live playtests. Source: noisebridge.net/wiki/Coffee_Table
• Open-source platform — the XJ music workstation and C++ runtime engine are published as open source. Source: github.com/xjmusic/xjmusic

Downloads

Individual assets below; the full set is also bundled as one archive. Logos may be used in editorial coverage — please don’t recolor, crop, or alter the marks.

↓ Download the full press kit (ZIP)

• Logo lockupPNG
• LogoSVG · vector
• Mental Roger markSVG · vector
• Logo, whitePNG · transparent
• Logo, blackPNG
• Founder portraitJPG
• Fever Tilt key artJPG · 16:9
• Fever Tilt title artJPG
• Fever Tilt — goalJPG · screenshot
• Fever Tilt — laserJPG · screenshot

Fever Tilt has its own kit. Additional Fever Tilt press assets — fact sheet, GIFs, tournament-system facts, and the Noisebridge origin story — are staged for fevertilt.com, which deploys separately. See the flagship’s studio portfolio page in the meantime.

Press inquiries