Imagine Dragons band love video games so much that they once made them late to a gig.
“We actually really pride ourselves on being on time,” said Dan Reynolds, lead singer for the chart-topping group. “But I will say there was one time where we were maybe just a couple of minutes late to stage because we were playing a game backstage.”
That ion has gone from a hobby to a professional endeavor. Dan Reynolds and his brother and band manager, Mac Reynolds, bonded over games as kids. Now, they’ve co-founded a company to make a game inspired by childhood memories of playing capture the flag in the woods.
“Dan was like ‘I’ve got this idea,’ and he had these sketches and animations and he had written music,” said Mac Reynolds. “He really was the first one to be like, ‘I’m going to go pound pavement and like try to find someone to help us code and you know interview people, not tell them who I am.’”
Dan Reynolds kept a low profile while recruiting for the game that became known as “Last Flag.” The first developers he hired only realized he was a world-famous pop star when they video-conferenced with him from Ukraine.
“One of those two people is currently serving on the front line in Ukraine,” said Mac Reynolds. “We just have so much love for everybody on that team and are grateful for a chance to keep working alongside them.”
5 Questions with Dan & Mac Reynolds
How have video game soundtracks inspired your musical sound?
Dan Reynolds: “Yeah, I think the earliest music that I would listen to was really soundtracks, whether it was from games, whether it was ‘Jurassic Park.’ I got into music from playing piano. My mom had us all take piano lessons for ten years from 6 to 16, Mozart and Beethoven and stuff. So I had a deep love for just classical music.
“Some of my favorite games had really great compositions and people who were behind it creating interesting soundtracks. ‘The Neverhood,’ for instance, was a game that I played growing up that had just the best music.”
Imagine Dragons has been a part of the gaming industry for years. You’ve performed at The Game Awards. You’ve worked with game composers to promote games. You recorded the theme song to “Arcane,” a TV show adapted from “League of Legends.” When did it occur to you that you all could form a game company of your own?
Dan Reynolds: “I think we’d always dreamt about it. When we were little kids, we would talk about what our dream jobs were. And like I said, you know, from a young age, we all loved video games. And there were eight boys in our family. One girl.”
Mac Reynolds: “We talked for years and years and years about games. You know, I grew up modeling and animating and then coding. And my mom pulled a shoe box out of a garage about a month ago and she showed me a paper she found, I’d written like, what do you want me to grow up? And I wrote ‘run a game studio.’ Very oddly specific, you know, for like a third grader.”
Your game “Last Flag.” It is based broadly, obviously, on a game that a lot of us may have played as kids: capture the flag. How does the basic premise of the game work?
Dan Reynolds: “‘Last flag’ is essentially hide and seek with a flag. So Mac and I both grew up in scouting, and we would go to scout camp every summer for a couple of weeks. And my favorite part about scout camp was we would play capture the flag in the woods.
“Each team got a flag, and you would hide it. You’d find a hiding space — it just had a peek out a little bit, was the rule. All the capture the flag games that we played on computer growing up really had set locations for the flag. I pitched this idea to Mac: ‘What if we made a game that was just like the capture the flag that we played in the woods, and you got to hide your flag.’ There’s a great joy that comes from that specific part of capture the flag that we thought hadn’t been captured in video games, no pun intended.”
Dan, your voice is also in the game’s soundtrack. What were you thinking of as you put this together?
Dan Reynolds: “We have such a superstar team. But Dave Lowmiller worked on ‘Battlefield,’ which was one of my favorite games growing up. And he’s just this incredible musician. The game is really set in the [1970s] because we thought that’s a really kind of funny but also colorful time period. And Dave and J.T., who is this incredible multi-instrumentalist and Grammy winner, and they both really have kind of created this soundscape more than anything. I’ve just been watching them work and sprinkling in, you know, a little bit of my vocals here and there.”
Mac Reynolds: “I joke around with Dan that the punishment for people when they lose, they get to hear him sing. But the truth is, it’s fine to have people on the team who genuinely will be like, ‘you know what? I don’t mind losing because I got to hear this great song.’ And there’s kind of this kind of same feeling throughout the game. It’s like intrigue, adventure and exploration. It’s just a ton of fun.”
Both of you will have been really into gaming since you were young kids. But there might be folks who think, ‘Okay, well, other celebrities have founded game companies before.’ How sensitive are you to your company being viewed as a vanity project for Imagine Dragons?
Dan Reynolds: “First and foremost, we have an incredible team, and they really are the stars of this. And Mac and I very much have gone into this knowing that we don’t know what we’re doing, and we’re just getting to be a part of a greater thing. But it’s very much not a side project.
“I can just tell you that the great part about being a musician is my job is a couple hours on stage, and then I’m in a hotel room. I’m a really introverted person, so I never partied on the road. I don’t go to clubs or anything like that. So what I’ve always done is just got on my computer and coded or created music or created art. And so it’s kind of lended perfectly to spending hours upon hours for, you know, 15 years. It’s something that we’ve just dedicated so much time to over the last decade.”
Mac Reynolds: “Yeah, one thing I’d add to that, one of the beautiful things is where music can often be about the artist, gaming is really about the art. Because of that, there’s a lot less egos in it, and I think that’s probably one thing Dan and I have loved, being able to work together in creating something that feels bigger than us and hopefully soon, whatever we’re making doesn’t belong to us anymore. It belongs to the people who adopt it and figure out what the game really means and how to play it and take it wherever it goes from there.”
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James Perkins Mastromarino produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Perkins Mastromarino also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2025 WBUR
