Many people picked up new — and, in some cases, unusual — hobbies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Imagine Dragons lead singer Dan Reynolds was no exception.
For Reynolds, that hobby was coding.
He turned to online resources, including YouTube, to help him learn the skill over the past few years and has since created “hundreds of prototypes.”
Dan and Mac Reynolds spoke at the Salt Palace Convention Center in downtown Salt Lake City to promote their new video game, set for release in a few months, and to share the lessons they learned along the way.
Much of the brothers’ message Wednesday, though lighthearted and candid, focused on dreaming big and accomplishing difficult goals.
“Coding was always so intimidating to me,” Reynolds said. “It seemed impossible to understand, like a foreign language. It was something that scared me, and I really love to do things that scare me.”
After roughly six years in the making, Last Flag is the result of the Reynolds brothers’ deep love for video games.
Childhood memories
“Way before music, I was playing video games,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds, one of nine children, recalled early memories of playing on the family Commodore, a home computer introduced in the early 1980s.
“It was such a rare thing, as the seventh-youngest brother, to ever get a chance to play, so whenever I did, it was like the greatest treat ever,” Reynolds said.
He detailed the family’s progression through various technologies and gaming systems, even giving a shoutout to the video game Monkey Island, which drew cheers from the audience.
Reynolds said the release of the Nintendo 64 was life-changing for his family.
“My fondest memories were multiplayer games with my brothers,” he said. “When we were really young, we always talked about making video games. I did not think I was going to be a musician.”
Battle of the Bands
Reynolds said that when he first arrived at Brigham Young University, he thought he might work for the FBI.
He later formed a band for BYU’s Battle of the Bands. While flunking a biology class, he scribbled down potential band names.
“I was writing down band names, and I wrote down the worst band name ever — Imagine Dragons,” Reynolds said.
The band won the competition and soon took off, leaving behind Reynolds’ and his brother’s early dream of making video games.
Mac, the older brother, then chimed in with a bit of his own childhood history.
“I don’t even know if I realized how deep of a dream it was for me,” he said.
“I went back and found this paper from third grade that said, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ and my answer was, ‘Own a video game studio,’ which was weirdly specific.”
How Last Flag came to be
One particular childhood memory has stayed with Grammy Award-winning artist Dan Reynolds over the years.
Scout camp.
“To be frank with you, I hated it. I really hated it,” Reynolds said.
“I didn’t like being dirty or being around a bunch of young boys who were throwing feces at each other,” he said.
What Reynolds did enjoy, however, were the late-night, spooky games of Capture the Flag in the woods with his Boy Scout troop.
He especially loved the way they played.
He and his troopmates would hide the flag almost entirely, leaving just a small part visible. They set a line in the middle, and if anyone crossed it and got tagged, they were out.
As Reynolds got into coding and began brainstorming, he came up with the idea to create a video game version of his beloved Scout camp game, just the way he remembered it.
“I felt like there was no video game that really captured that ‘in the woods at night’ feeling, where you actually hide the flag,” he said.
Reynolds noted that many capture-the-flag modes in games they played growing up, like Halo, included clear markers showing where the flag was.
He said those modes took away the joy of finding where the other team had hidden it and running it back to your side.
Building from the ground up
With the idea in mind, Dan pitched it to Mac, and they began building it.
Originally, it was going to be just the two of them: Dan would handle the coding, and Mac would do the animation.
“We knew it was going to be really bad, but it was just going to be fun for our family to play,” Dan said.
It wouldn’t be the first time the musician-turned-coder created a fun game for his family.
In a humorous exchange, Dan said, “Something that I made just for my family that I’ve never even talked about is, later if you feel so inclined, if you get on the App Store and look up Piplit …”
“It’s really good, actually,” his older brother, Mac, interjected.
A trip to the App Store and a search for Dan’s game, Piplit, initially returns results for Pilot and a prompt suggesting, “Search for Piplit instead?” — just as Dan said would happen, “because it’s so obscure.”
The search eventually leads to a Tetris-like puzzle app.
“I made it just for my kids,” Dan continued. “I love to make things. I love to challenge myself. I am always making things like this.”
“Piplit hasn’t exploded yet, but maybe by the end of this conference it will,” Mac joked.
The Reynolds brothers now have a team of more than 50 people and said they are grateful to have surrounded themselves “with incredible people who are much more talented” than they are.
Release information
Last Flag, a game with visuals and animation reminiscent of Fortnite, will be released April 14 for PC and is expected on gaming consoles shortly afterward.
It will likely have a much different reception than Dan’s family-favorite puzzle app.
The brothers shared the demo trailer as they wrapped up their message. Here it is:
The game will be available on Steam and Epic Games.