Imagine Dragons caught a stray at SGF. They didn't deserve it.

I wasn’t even sure if I should ask the question.

I was on the phone with Mac Reynolds, the brother of Imagine Dragons lead singer Dan Reynolds and also the band’s manager. He was on his way to Los Angeles for Summer Game Fest¹ , where the game development studio he founded with Dan, Night Street Games, would reveal its first game: the zany third-person capture-the-flag shooter Last Flag.

Before the game was announced, I had the opportunity to play a few rounds of Last Flag in a demo environment with a mix of devs, press, influencers and friends of the studio. Even in this early state, the game is a blast, calling to mind at times the original Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) and elsewhere, in some of its characters and visuals, Team Fortress 2. After choosing from a roster of heroes — the stars of Last Flag’s debut SGF trailer — players hide a flag in a nook on their side of the map. Once the flags are hidden, fighting begins over three radio towers dotting the map’s dividing line. Control over these towers gives players respawn options and also provides some kind of additional intel (though I wasn’t attentive enough to notice how exactly this played out during my time with the game). All the while, one or two of the more nimble characters bloodhound across enemy territory, darting in and out of nooks looking for the flag. (Incidentally, everyone is also harvesting minor harmless NPCs around the map for money to upgrade their abilities, though this felt uncoupled from the core action of the game in a way that feels maybe a bit unintentional.)

The Battlefront comparison is particularly instructive here, I think. My memories of that game include the intense thrill of meat grind-y action, of me and a dozen guys blitzing down a hallway or across a more or less open field toward a jumble of opponents — but also the almost-wistful stretches of downtime: sprinting toward some barren corner of the map to cap a command point nobody else would care to contest, backed by some of John Williams’s more sedate Star Wars compositions. A little unstructured. Both over- and under-designed.

I mean this in a complimentary way: Last Flag also frequently toggles between these modes of high and low action. Skirmishes at or between the three radio towers are usually frenetic — Looney Tunes style fight clouds zipping back and forth across the map’s equator. The hunt for the flag, though, straddles the line between bureaucratic box-checking (I’ve checked this part of the map, and this one, and looked here, also here, etc.) and the tension of a too-long quiet stretch in a good battle royale. The variety feels nice, enabled by maps that are pockmarked with points of interest, elevation changes and sprawling tunnels.

Things flagged for me (pun intended) toward the endgame. Once the flag has been captured and brought back to one side of the map or the other, the game is basically over. Despite a minute-long grace period, I don’t think I ever witnessed a team retake its flag from the enemy base. The arcade-y, febrile energy that makes fights thrilling in the mid-game — when everyone’s just kind of bopping and bouncing around the map — works to the detriment of the team trying to dig an opponent out of an entrenched position.²

But wait! Back to that question I mentioned.

While preparing for my interview with Mac, I saw, via his Instagram account, that he had traveled to Ukraine in 2023 — and posted at length about his trip and support for the Ukrainian people. I was also ambiently aware of his brother’s history of supporting LGBTQ+ people (particularly Mormon and ex-Mormon queer people), and Dan’s headline-grabbing decision to wave a Palestinian flag at a recent concert. These aren’t particularly outré positions. Still, I wanted to know: Where did the two brothers’ inclination toward advocacy comes from?

“Our mom always told us to speak up for what you think is right,” Mac said. “But I do also want to draw a line of distinction. Imagine Dragons is Imagine Dragons. At Night Street Games, I would never want to do something to undersell the importance of all the people in that team. With anything that can get political, you can end up getting divisive instead of uniting, and none of us speak for them. So I also want to be careful. The things I believe and stand up for, whatever I do, and Dan as well — that's us. I don't ever want it to reflect positively or negatively on this wonderful group of people who are building a game. … So I know I'm kind of sidestepping a little bit the question, but I think it is important to kind of point out what we see as our responsibility as artists, versus our responsibility as co-founders[.]”

The whole exchange was a bit orthogonal to the point of the call — to discuss Night Street’s new game — but in retrospect, I’m glad it came up. The subject of political statements blowing back on a studio was a live one at Summer Game Fest. On Friday, during the main presentation, Ian Proulx, game director for Splitgate 2, walked out on stage in a black “Make FPS Great Again” cap. Everyone disliked that. (I’m being a bit tart but truly, even the most generous interpretations of the hat stunt were along the lines of “It’s stupid but the game is good.”) For several days, Proulx insisted it wasn’t a big deal and didn’t mean anything and that he wasn’t going to apologize, until on Tuesday he apologized. (He also spent the weekend apologizing for the studio’s criticisms of the Call of Duty franchise and over a Splitgate 2 microtransaction controversy.)

Normally I would feel bad dragging one studio’s controversies into a write-up of a completely different game — except there is a connection! The SGF Splitgate 2 trailer featured a song by Imagine Dragons, which inevitably made the band a target for jokes and criticism alongside Proulx and Splitgate 2. And yet, before Summer Game Fest even began, Mac, who was at the show to promote an entirely different game, gave a perfectly reasonable answer to a question about advocacy and the impacts it might have on his coworkers and subordinates. So it felt like a cruelly ironic twist that Imagine Dragons would spend the weekend catching strays after the show.

Below is the rest of my conversation with Mac. As you’ll see, it frequently returned to the subject of Mac’s coworkers and the people who work in games more broadly, for whom he had lots and lots of praise.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.³

ReaderGrev: Can you tell me a bit about how the studio went from idea to reality?

Mac Reynolds: This wasn't such a big leap for Dan and I. We grew up — like a lot of other people — playing a ton of games. For me, Sierra Online, LucasArts, Delphine, these studios were a huge part of my youth. Dan and I come from a family with a bunch of brothers, we spent a lot of time playing games together. And Dan does a lot coding, in C# mostly. I grew up doing 3D modeling and animating. And we talked for years about making video games. It was always on the mind. And a few years ago, I think it just felt like: Why do we keep talking about it? Why don't we just do something?

I've got to give the credit to Dan here. He really took the first serious initiative in that he started going on random outsourcing websites, finding people that we could work with. We had limited coding and art experience, but we needed some professionals to work with. And he started interviewing people — and did not tell them who he was. And then when he narrowed it down to his favorite four, that's about the time that I kind of jumped in full-time with him. We started interviewing people together and it was kind of a funny experience. We ended up working with this company, Argentics, and it was funny when they were like: Wait a second, you look kind of like that guy from Imagine Dragons.

Fast forward a bit. We took this idea and it had a lot of iterations over the years. It started with Dan doing his animations and music and all kinds of different things, and us kind of fighting and jousting over: Should there be fog of war? Should there not? Should it be isometric view versus third person versus whatever? And we worked with [Argentics], put together a prototype that felt fun. Then we kind of did it like any other studio. We went out and tried to raise money. And when we raised a little bit of money, we were able to start putting together a team of folks who worked on some of our favorite games, you know folks from Blizzard, Ubisoft and a lot of other just great studios who had been really inspiring to us. Getting to rub shoulders with them and watch this germ of an idea become a Night Street Games idea was really, really special.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you and Dan settled on the characters, the setting, the style?

Mac: It was a natural evolution. We started with capture the flag. We love capture the flag game modes. We've played so many over the years: Quake, Unreal Tournament, whatever. But none of them really scratched that itch of when we were kids in Boy Scouts playing capture the flag in the woods at night. Namely, they didn't have hiding and finding. So we started from game loop, and we always try to take it back to game loop. Everything you're doing — the art and music, all these worlds, those things are so important, and add so much flavor and depth. But at the end of the day, it's got to come back to how much fun you have playing.

We kind of fell into this, like, ‘70s-ish feels like a really interesting time for this thing, because it's just unique. The ‘70s can mean a lot of things to different people. For us, we use it very loosely. It's really about big personalities and expressiveness. That just seemed like a fun space for Tarantino-esque, larger-than-life, tongue-in-cheek humor. You know, we would think like, LucasArts did a great job on Day of the Tentacle or Monkey Island — you know, these games where you feel like you're in on the joke with them. And so that stuff all kind of infused really early on into some of the animation, music, sound, sketches that we were working on.

It kind of happened piece by piece. I would say game loop came first, art came second, and the world just took shape from there. And soon it was like, you almost don't even need to think about it. You're just going on instinct because you already feel like you're living in that world. It's been a little bit of a fun snowball.

Are there any little flourishes or features that you’re really happy made their way into the game, that feel like they came directly from your input?

Mac: You're asking me the question I hate to answer. I'm a manager. Managers love to stay behind the scenes.

You know, I fought really hard for this idea of the respawn. [ed. note: In Last Flag, after you die you’re brought back to a “green room“ with tubes that shoot you out at a handful of destinations. A clear wall separates your team’s green room from the enemy’s, so you can see them before the match starts, or also if you happen to die at the same time as one of your opponents.] Respawn is kind of boring in shooters. It’s not the funnest moment. And I had this idea of like… We used to have this kind of clunky system for how you get to the radar towers. You’d just basically select them during the game and when you respawn, you just respawn there. But the green room idea was like: Hey, what if you go back to a central location, and you have these tubes teleport you there? And you know what, it'd be fun if the tubes are shared, and you can see the enemy green room. And like, that can make for some fun shenanigans pre-match, but also mid-match where it's like — Wait, I see the other guy running to Tube A; What's happening out there? Is that where their flag is? Are they defending heavily there? A lot of kind of fun things came out of that. So I'm proud of that one.

Man, I'm like, so worried on any of these. I'm like, was that just me? It was such a collaborative process, right?

Has anything surprised you about working in the video game industry?

Mac: In music it's often about the artist, first and foremost. And in gaming, it really is about the art, because it's so collaborative. You're bringing together so many people to make something come alive, and because of it, I think I'm surprised by just how generous the spirit is. People share things with each other, are very kind to each other, very collaborative. And that to me has just been really awesome. That’s maybe my favorite happy surprise, if you will.

Online culture can be really challenging. It can be very linear and very, you know, this side or that side, and that can spill over into the way people talk about games.⁴ I would just say, what I find is that most developers are really passionate people. It's like, a ton of artists. And I say, even if you’re an engineer, you’re an artist. It's a ton of people working on their craft with a lot of heart, because they want to be there. And so, you never celebrate any other company going through hard times — whether it's publicity or sales or whatever else — because you just know at the end of the day, man, these are a lot of great people really, really trying to make something special.

Have there been any difficult moments? Do you have any least favorite parts of making a game?

Mac: Fundraising. [laughs] It’s really hard to raise money for a game.

It's been heart-wrenching to see so many great studios around us struggle and sometimes fail over the last little while. I know some of it's cyclical, but that has been really, really rough to see. It just highlights that that's a tough part of the business. You've got to be able to keep the lights on for all the folks who are making a game together. And that could be hard in 2025.

The other things are all kind of fun challenges: Figuring out how to work as a group, learning to grow your muscles as a team together. You know, from the outside, you might kind of feel like: Man, how did that game cost that much or take that long [to make]? And then you build a game and you’re like: That’s why! It's really hard! It's a lot of work!

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1. Yes, it would make more sense for it to be Summer Games (plural) Fest. I’m not the only one who thinks this.

2. No obvious place to put this but: The music — credited to Dan Reynolds, musician/producer JT Daly, and composer Dave Lowmiller — is great. Basically every tune in the game has that “hear it once and you’ll never forget it” quality.

3. For transparency’s sake, my changes are largely focused on cleaning up “ums,” “likes” and “ahs,” whittling down my questions to let you get to the answers faster, and cutting certain parts of answers (or entire exchanges) that are redundant or irrelevant or which make sense over audio but not over text. My goal is never to change the meaning of what’s been said to me.

4. Don’t I know it!