Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds was feeling depleted when he turned to a childhood joy: video games.
“I was having creative burnout,” he told a crowd at the Silicon Slopes Summit in downtown Salt Lake City. “I was between record cycles.”
Reynolds joined his brother Mac on Wednesday to discuss Night Street Games, the duo’s indie video game studio. The brothers spoke about how they came up with “Last Flag,” an upcoming five-on-five, third-person shooter game that will be released for PC in April.
The game — the studio’s first — was inspired by Dan’s childhood rounds of capture the flag at Boy Scouts.
The brothers showed early renditions of the game’s animation to the crowd and recounted memories of building its soundtrack and sound effects. To portray the sound of zombie limbs breaking, for example, the Imagine Dragons singer chewed cucumbers in front of a microphone.
“My pitch to Mac was I wanted it to be a Tarantino-made video game, set in the ‘70s, kind of gory, and really over the top,” Dan Reynolds said.
The brothers founded Night Street Games in 2020.
Mac Reynolds, the studio’s CEO, said this journey has led the brothers outside their comfort zones. Now, their company has about 50 employees.