Inside Last Flag: Reinventing Capture-the-Flag with Night Street Games

I first got a look at Last Flag in the summer of 2025. I sat down in a gaming cafe in California at the Last Flag LAN Party with dozens of PCs all ready to go. My first few rounds were…messy…to say the least, but they were certainly fun.

Since then, we have learned quite a bit more about Last Flag, including full preview coverage here at CGM, where writer Jordan Biordi noted, “Last Flag isn’t your standard capture the flag in the same way Halo or earlier FPS games were. The game is fleshed out by a unique cast of characters, each with distinctive designs and functions during each battle.”

We were lucky enough to chat with the team at Night Street Games, Game Director Matthew Berger and co-founder and CEO, Mac Reynolds. Those names might even sound familiar. Berger worked for Blizzard for nearly a decade, with games like Diablo 3 under his belt. Reynolds, on the other hand, used to work in 3D modelling and animation, but has since become the manager of a band you likely know, Imagine Dragons. His brother, lead singer Dan Reynolds, is the other co-founder of Night Street Games, and together, they have brought us Last Flag.

We talked to the pair about where Last Flag started, where it could be going, and even picked their brains about some of their favourite maps and characters.

Could you let us know who you are and your roles on Last Flag?

Matthew Berger: Hi. My name is Matthew. I’m the game director on Last Flag, and I work a lot on the game design and lots of other stuff.

Mac Reynolds: I’m Mac Reynolds. I’m the co-founder and CEO.

Great. So, what got you both started? How did Last Flag happen?

Mac Reynolds: I’ll start. You know, for me, I grew up playing video games. I have a family with a ton of brothers.

That sounds like too many brothers. I have one.

Mac Reynolds: I have seven brothers, so I wasn’t joking. Seven brothers, one sister. She’s delightful. She’s amazing. She is also a true beauty. And we grew up playing games, you know, raised on, like, Sierra online, LucasArts. And all these studios were super inspiring to us growing up. I used to do 3D modelling/animating as a kid. My brother Dan is a coder, and we talked about making games together for years. My other brother, Patrick, does music; I took his music for a while. You know, he’s in the band. I’ve been managing the band for a while.

What band? Tell me more.

Mac Reynolds: Yeah, they’re called Imagine Dragons.

(Laughs) I’ve never heard of them. My kids aren’t obsessed with them or anything.

Mac Reynolds: I appreciate that. (Laughs) We talked for years about starting a studio and living out our dream to make—a couple of years ago, we finally got to talking about it and did it. So we put our head down and kind of just quietly been building. We built our first prototype around this game, Last Flag, which is inspired by being Boy Scouts. Like, capture the flag in the woods and trying to recreate that magical experience when you’re a kid, actually hiding and finding the thrill of nature and being all these other things.

We love CTF game modes. We love playing with our friends. Never before did we get that scratch the same itch that you get from playing real capture the flag, where you actually do it. So, fast forward to today. We’re now working with a group of people. We get to work alongside a team we built and worked on some of our favourite teams.

And some Canadians.

Mac Reynolds: We have, actually, we have real Canadians. We love Canadians. But you know, working with the other series, where I like—some of my favourite games of all time. Matt even worked on the Diablo series.

And how do you fit in with Last Flag, Matt? Where’d you come from? Oh, Canada!

Matthew Berger: Well, I was recruited in Canada. I was introduced to Mac, and he showed me his game, showed me his prototype, and I immediately saw something that got me excited. And then Mac himself, just talking with him, hearing his ideas, you know, he’s very infectious. And whenever you work on something creative, like games, a lot of it is, what are you working on and who are you working with? And we really hit it off. I really loved working with him, chatting about the game, and that’s how we started working on Last Flag together.

Now, I’m curious from both of your perspectives, so I guess you jumped in at different points there—how has Last Flag changed from inception to what we’re looking at now, from you at the beginning and you, when you jumped in?

Mac Reynolds: I’ll do the first half. I want to say, like, Matthew and the whole team—I mean, we really believe in the best ideas. Even as we brought people along, we wanted to play very well on the game, and it was good because the game got so much better with the team. The inception of the game, all we knew we wanted was capture the flag. We looked at, like, an isometric view. We looked at, like, fog-of-war things.

We tried a lot of different things before we kind of laid it out. It’s kind of a third-person perspective. And even then, we found fun in hiding and finding, but it was inconsistent and—and I’ll turn it over to Matthew then, because that’s one of the things we had to kind of tackle together as a team: figure out how you keep that freedom and chaos but make it tamed enough for a real game.

Matthew Berger: So, capture the flag was so central—capture the flag first, shooter second. What we did was we actually stripped out almost all the mechanics of the game. We rebuilt the map from the ground up around this notion of capturing the flag and not having a large area to hide the flag. And then we’re like, okay, now the problem is, it’s great to hide it, but it takes a little bit too long the final time.

So we added these radar towers that split the map in half, and if you control the radar towers, you can respawn there, so your travel time is shorter. But also, every 30 seconds, they tell you, “Oh, the flag is not here,” and so they essentially are clearing certain sections of the map. That makes it easier to kind of find where the flag is, but you still have to kind of find them.

I like the negative information. “I’m not going to tell you where it is. I’m going to tell you where it’s not, though.” Now, what you said just now, “capture the flag first”, a lot of games I’ve played in my history—World of Warcraft, even Fortnite—now they have all the capture the flag versions, but they are something else first, and then they added it in. So why the choice to go the other way in Last Flag? And what do you think you’re doing that changes the game?

Matthew Berger: Well, I said it earlier, this was their idea to go with a capture the flag game, and so that was the core. One of the reasons the game is so fun, the reason it sinks so much, is that we rebuilt the game three times. There was the initial prototype, and we stripped out, like I said, the mechanics that were getting in the way; we refined it and rebuilt the map. Then we ported it from Unity to Unreal. And so every time we did that, we reduced the source and the core mechanic just shined even brighter. It just kept refining itself.

And so we only put in things that make sense for that core mechanic. Hiding and finding—we leaned into that, and anything that got in the way, we just got rid of. And so we think that we’ve built an experience that is, from the ground up, capture-the-flag. The map is built a certain way. The contestants are built a certain way. Their abilities are thought of a certain way. And so it really is a capture the flag experience. By leaning into this, we offer something different.

So you said that you stripped some things away from previous versions of Last Flag. What things didn’t work out in your mind?

Matthew Berger: We used to have lots of monsters on the map that got in the way. There was fog-of-war that made it harder to find this place. We used to have items, and so you had to manage picking up items. We wanted the game to be faster. We wanted you to have this joy all the time—movement, discovery—and we didn’t want anything that got in the way of that. So we really focused, first and foremost, on the core elements of the game.

That was hard because there were things that were fine in their own right, but didn’t serve that purpose. And to your question about what was different about this: I think a lot of other shooters are either shooter first or something else first. Our game—I like to think of high school and some of the best games, or Gorilla Attack, right? It’s like just tag. It’s something simple that you understand how it is, and this is something that is simple and intuitive.

But also, we have to kind of calibrate, right? Because privacy can be a little bit more like Poker—it’s like, do I just find it, and that’s lucky? And that’s where the tower… like, how do you balance it? It’s objective gameplay, and you’re going to make choices like chess, figuring out the playing field the way you want to play it. That’s where the depth comes in, and that’s why we pulled out the Wendigo monster and turned the map to night. You know, there’s a lot of fun things we can build out.

For people who haven’t played, do we have multiple maps in Last Flag? Do you think that somewhere down the line, there may be more characters, more maps or mechanics?

Matthew Berger: There are two maps here, and we will have four maps at launch. And then there’s about—I think there’s six contestants here. We’re already internally playing our two new contestants and working on the two after, so we’ll have ten at launch.

Are you worried about people stacking one character or struggling with balancing in Last Flag?

Matthew Berger: We’ve been doing a lot of playtesting internally. I have over a thousand games on the first map, and then we started having internal playtesting. We’re obviously constantly looking at how the contestants feel. One thing that’s important is it’s fun first, competitive second. So we are trying very carefully not to have anybody unbalanced. We want you to feel awesome, and then at other times, the other players do.

So everyone needs to feel all the pain in Last Flag.

Mac Reynolds: Yeah. Matt honestly often talked about recalibrating. I always want to err on the side of caution. That goes to this point: every time you hit a button, you feel like something should happen.

Matthew Berger: Yeah, it’s really important. That’s why, when you look at the contestants on the ground, that’s why their animations have so much personality when you’re using the abilities. That’s why the effects are so big; that’s why the audio is a big deal. That’s why when you lose a match, you have maybe the best song in the game that you lost. Nobody likes losing the dance. I’ve never heard the winning song, but I’m pretty good.

I died real fast.

Matthew Berger: That’s a really important thing we’re always looking for. When you down an enemy, you don’t call their health down to zero; they go down into a dumpster. So now I can come in, but you can finish them off if you do that. They play a really cool animation for help. If you’re the person who just got finished, it’s not great, but you get to see a fun animation instead of just somebody just shooting in the ground.

Now here’s a big one. I don’t know if you’re ready for this question.

Matthew Berger: I’m sitting here, waiting for you.

We’ve got two maps in Last Flag now, but there are four coming. I don’t know if you can talk about the four. First, you have to tell me your favourite map, even if it’s just the two. But I prefer the four, I’ll be honest.

Matthew Berger: Ah. That’s fair. Okay, so you’re not going to like this answer, but here goes. So, yeah, what I love about the two maps that I’m not going to tell you about is… The third map, our third map, has a different size, and we’ve added a new gameplay mechanic. That changes how you play that. And then what I like about the fourth map is we found a really interesting idea for the visuals and the personality. That, again, makes it feel very different. So, it’s a bit of a tease.

Mac Reynolds: At this point, my favourite map right now is map two. It’s locked in, and the reason being it is totally packed with discoverable areas. Every time I play, I’m like, Holy crap, there’s a whole sauna in, like a cave beach resort that’s hidden in a cave that I didn’t even know about. Like, there are so many.

Matthew Berger: The artists are constantly putting things in! Yeah, like I was watching the video that we have playing in a loop, and I’m like, “When did the two teddy bears, the two snow teddy bears, cuddle each other?” When did that turn up?

Yeah, I think I have no artistic talent, but I feel like that was all I would do—add all this stuff.

Matthew Berger: It’s incredible.

Mac Reynolds: That’s why nothing’s getting done over here. We’re just adding cuddly teddy bears every year. That’s the flag. I’m like, where did this come from? Where did this come from?!

Matthew Berger: Actually, that’s not true. The real truth is, anytime I’m looking for the flag, I’m like, “Oh, this is a great place to hide the flag.” And then every time I’m hiding the flag, I’m like, “Where did that place go!” You can never find it. And then I’ll find a new way.

We’re discussing our favourite maps in Last Flag, but will there be maps that are specifically geared toward different characters?

Matthew Berger: I will say the reason that probably will never happen is because the whole story is this guy—Victor Baxter, media mogul, Text Enterprise, very mysterious—created this television, and there’s a little bit of a mega market there, and the reporters are like a Stepford Wives kind of shiny surface, something sinister, kind of billowing. You see the advertisements everywhere.

You’re going to know you’re on this television show. It seems great, but these are all about the, I think, Disneyland-like, curated nature in a way. A lot of these are like, yeah, you’re outdoors, but you always know I’m also on a TV show. And so, these people come from all around the world. They have all their own stories and the reasons they’re competing. But these shows are curated by Victor, and there’s a reason for that.

And when you personally play Last Flag—I guess it’s a two-parter—who do you play to win and who do you play because it brings you joy?

Matthew Berger: Yeah, that’s a great question. I love that question. So, it depends on the situation in the match because, depending on what the other team is doing…So I really like playing Camila, who’s our weapons engineer. She comes from Brazil, right? And she can teleport people around. She can put her turrets down. So I really, really like her.

And, you know, other players. I love that character. But sometimes I’m getting, you know, pinged by an archer because they’ve got a little bit more long range. And so sometimes I’m like, you know what? I’m going to pick Soo-Jin, who’s our master thief. She’s stealthy. She comes out of nowhere, and now I’m helping the archer see a little bit what it’s like to be on the other end. So I love those two characters.

Mac Reynolds: It’s 100% bounty hunter when I’m trying to win. Okay. I love the jail cell combo. We’re throwing the thing at Julius. He’s amazing. For fun, it always has historically been the scout because running around the map is one of my favourite things to do. I would just do that all day. But lately it’s changed for me. It is the Archer, and I’m terrible at it. I’m so bad at her. But short dash is so fun.

Matthew Berger: That’s the other secret is I’m not the best Masako player, but she has so much personality. Masako is wonderful. I love dashing around with her. She has so much stuff.

Last Flag will release on April 14, 2026, for PC and for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S later this year.