Singer of the American rock band Imagine Dragons launches on Tuesday Last Flag, a PC video game inspired by his childhood with the scouts and developed with his brother, manager of the quartet. “This is not just a passion project, we have been working on it for over five years now,” said Dan Reynolds during an online exchange with journalists, a few weeks before the game’s release.
At the head of Night Street Games, a studio of about thirty people that they founded in 2020, Dan and his brother Mac quietly worked on a “capture the flag” game where two teams of five players compete online. The goal: to hide your own flag as best as possible and steal that of your opponents.
A project older than Imagine Dragons
“I grew up in a family of eight boys and one girl, and we were all a bit of ‘geeks’,” recalls the 38-year-old singer, for whom creating his own video game “was a childhood dream”. At the end of the 2000s, while he was planning to develop his first game with his brother at his side, he formed a university band called Imagine Dragons and “boom, it just exploded,” recalls this fan of games like Starcraft and League of Legends.
Known for international hits like “Believer” and “Thunder,” Imagine Dragons has since become one of the most popular pop rock bands in the world, with over 74 million albums sold and 160 billion streams, according to their label Warner Music Group. “The past fifteen years have been incredible, but we kept thinking ‘what if we started creating games together?'” continues Dan Reynolds.
A game that “offers something different”
To imagine this title with colorful graphics and a very “seventies” atmosphere, the two brothers drew inspiration from their summer vacations at scout camp, where they played a similar game in the woods. While the game may evoke the ambiance of Fortnite, one of the most popular games in the world, Mac Reynolds assures that Last Flag stands out by prioritizing objective capture over simply eliminating opponents.
The game tackles the highly competitive online shooter games sector, which has seen several major productions like Concord and Highguard quickly shut down in recent years due to lack of players. But “even if the competition is tough, a new shooting game can succeed if it offers something different,” believes the Imagine Dragons manager. A release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles is also planned later in the year.
