At one point or another, you’ve probably heard an Imagine Dragons song. From “Believer” to “Thunder” to “Radioactive,” the American pop-rock band’s music has dominated the world since 2008 thanks to its catchy beats and powerful lyrics. Their songs have been featured in movies, TV shows, adverts, and even video games. But now, Imagine Dragons brothers, Mac Reynolds, the band’s manager, and Dan Reynolds, lead singer, are taking their creative minds to create their own video game dubbed “Last Flag“.
Development of Last Flag started sometime in 2020 under the brothers’ newly founded development studio Night Street Games.
Speaking with both Dan and Mac Reynolds, I wanted to know more about this newfound venture, what inspired Last Flag, and where they’d like to take Night Street Games in the future. But first, I was curious about why the brothers wanted to develop a game based on the Capture the Flag game mode and the inspiration behind it.
Mac Reynolds tells me, “The game is actually inspired by real-life capture the flag, which we played a lot as kids. Although we loved the CTF game modes in Unreal Tournament, Quake, and a ton of other games – none of them had that core element of “hide your flag anywhere you want.” There’s something freeing about that component that makes every game different and brings in a little more psychology when you’re sneaking around the map trying to put yourself in the enemy team’s shoes. As soon as we started down that path in development, we knew there was something special and different about it. Since then, it’s been all about how we capture that in a game loop that feels super replayable and fun as a team.”
One of the characters is a Boy Scout, which makes sense because of the game’s inspiration. But what’s the story behind the other characters we see?
Dan Reynolds says, “Each of the contestants has their own reason for auditioning for the show. Some of them are more obvious, but others you really have to dig around as a player to discover. Julius, for example, is a bounty hunter turned author who is looking to promote his new book. Alejandro, our soldier, is trying to draw attention to his sister, who went missing when they were younger. He wears her guitar on his back in hopes she’ll see him on TV and keep her hopes alive. Some people may have more nefarious reasons for being there…”
I believe the game started development around 2020? How did you go from an idea to actually making the game, and have there been any unforeseen challenges during development?
Mac says, “Making your first game is a little like making your first album – you spend a lot of time in blue sky territory just thinking and planning and tinkering before things start taking shape. You never get that luxury for your second game or album, so we tried to stay unboxed in our ideas for as long as we could. It started with conversations Dan and I had, and then sketches, and even songs and animations Dan made that started to flesh things out. We tried everything from isometric views to fog of war before we found what felt like the right embodiment of all these ideas.
There have been plenty of challenges in the dev process. One of these was figuring out how to take something a little chaotic, though lots of fun (hiding the flag anywhere), and give it enough of an objective framework that it doesn’t just feel like luck if you happen on the other flag. A lot of brainstorms with the team and particularly Matthew Berger (our incredible Game Director) led us to the idea of radar towers and other elements which tamed that chaos JUST enough.”
[For Dan] What’s this entire process for you been like compared to writing music? I’ve heard you’re something of a programmer yourself – have you implemented any of those skills into the game?
“I usually write from a pretty vulnerable and autobiographical place, so it was a nice change to just focus on the world of Last Flag and this whole 70s universe when working on the music. It was a pretty collaborative process with myself, Dave Lowmiller (our audio lead who also is in a metal band and did sound for Battlefield), and Grammy-nominated producer JT Daly. A ton of real instruments and time-period-appropriate recording techniques were used. We’re having a lot of fun.
I started taking programming classes online years ago, and it’s really become my outlet when I’m not on stage. I’ve gotten pretty decent at prototyping ideas in Unity, and when we first started Last Flag, that was really our jumping off point until we were able to grow the incredible team of devs we have today.”
Now that Last Flag is getting nearer to completion, are the creative juices flowing for some other ideas and the next venture for Night Street Games?
Mac says, “Our team has already been pitching ideas for game two to each other, as well as exciting places to take Last Flag in the future. But for now, we’re really trying to focus our creative energy on listening to feedback from our players and never allowing ourselves to feel too comfortable in thinking we know exactly what the perfect version of this game will be. We learn something every day from them, and have plenty of ideas to cultivate and incorporate into the game before we can let our foot off the gas.”
Dan tells me, “We definitely want to be a multi-game studio, but we know that means doing this first one right. This isn’t a side project for us, so we try to keep a long-term perspective on how we make this first game. We want to be doing this for a very long time.”
Last Flag is currently available in a free, limited-time demo on Steam from August 25–September 1 as part of Steam’s Third-Person Shooter Fest.
Last Flag is scheduled to launch in 2026 on Windows PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, with console versions planned to be released at a later date.
For more multiplayer news, check out our articles on Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s campaign merger and Battlefield 6’s map selection. As always, make sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more!
Tom Henderson is Insider Gaming's Co-Founder and Editor-In-Chief. When he's not running one of the industry's leading independent video game websites, he's probably playing an FPS like Call of Duty,…
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