Before Imagine Dragons, brothers Dan and Mac Reynolds always wanted to make videogames—now their first, Last Flag, is about to release

Upcoming hero shooter Last Flag was a sponsor of last year's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, and we spent a day with brothers Dan and Mac Reynolds talking about the game and how it came to be. We couldn't broadcast the entire mini-doc we shot during the show, but with Last Flag's release imminent, we've now published the full cut: A 22-minute look, embedded above, at the ideas behind the capture-the-flag shooter.

Fans of the band Imagine Dragons may find it especially interesting, because Dan happens to be the lead singer, and Mac the band's manager. But while Dan did lend his musical skills to Last Flag's '70s-themed soundtrack, the game isn't directly related to the band. The brothers' interest in game development even predates their interest in music.

"Mac and I have always dreamed about making a game studio as far back as I can remember," said Dan.

Regarding the soundtrack, though, producer and multi-instrumentalist JT Daly features heavily in the video, and it is quite cool to see him hop from drums, to bass, to saxophone and more as he records gameshow-inspired tracks. (If you're wondering about the squiggly white tube he's playing at 12:30, it looks to me like a Yamaha Venova, a kind of saxophone-recorder hybrid.)

Last Flag did also have a musical start: Dan explored his ideas by creating a song for each character to pair with gory sketches (they have since toned down the hyperviolence for more of a Team Fortress 2 vibe). He also started learning Unity early in the pandemic, and originally the whole game was going to be developed by Dan and Mac alone, but the brothers eventually decided to recruit a team under the banner Night Street Games.

They didn't entirely see eye-to-eye about the genre they were targeting—Dan's a League of Legends player, Mac's more into shooters—but were both set on capture the flag from the start.

Hide the flag?

Along with flag capturing, flag hiding is a factor in Last Flag. One member of each team manually hides their team's flag during a setup phase, squirreling it away in a nook or cranny somewhere on their side of the map. When the match starts proper, players can opt to slink around in enemy territory hoping to stumble on the flag, or focus on capturing central towers on the map that reveal clues about the enemy flag's location over time.

"The mechanic of being able to hide the flag, versus your flag is always in this set position, is really at the core of what Last Flag is," says Dan. "To give this element that captures the feeling that I had growing up in school yard P.E., hiding your flag, or in scout camp in the woods."

As its name makes clear, Last Flag is 100% about CTF. There is no extracting, battle royaling, or deathmatching: just flags. Mac thinks that if they'd tried to include a variety of modes as some shooters do, they wouldn't have been able to do CTF the justice they felt it deserved.

"I think that you're always limited in how far you can take a concept when it's the sideshow to your main event," said Mac. "Our commitment is to say no, there is something worthy of a real game here, and it requires everything from the game mechanics to the level design to the heroes and their abilities—everything from the ground up has to be built to support capture the flag."

I've played a handful of Last Flag rounds at different stages of development, and I've found the format fun so far. At first I thought there was no reason to hide your flag anywhere except along the very back of your zone, since that means more ground to traverse for opposing flag runners. But the flipside is that your opponents are probably going to search those areas first. If Last Flag winds up being popular enough for a meta to develop, I can foresee some clever mind games being played.

It is of course tough to make it in the competitive shooter biz today, but Last Flag's modest $15 base price doesn't suggest to me the sort of misaligned expectations we've seen thwart other efforts in the genre recently.

Last Flag is out on Steam and the Epic Games Store on April 14, and will be discounted to $12 through April 22. You can find more details on the launch and summer update plan here.