Spawn On Me with Kahlief Adams: A Video Game Podcast · Spawn On Me LLC

Is Imagine Dragons making the next big CTF shooter?

·52 min·4 clips

Mac reveals how childhood Capture the Flag games in the woods inspired their new shooter Last Flag.

Kahlief Adams hosts the team from Night Street Games on Spawn On Me to discuss their debut game Last Flag, revealed at Summer Games Fest. Mac, the studio CEO and co-founder, opens by explaining the concept: a third-person shooter built entirely around authentic capture-the-flag mechanics. He and his brother Dan grew up playing capture the flag with Boy Scouts at night, finding that every video game version of CTF, from Unreal Tournament to Quake to World of Warcraft, focused on payload escort and knowing where the enemy base was rather than the core experience of actually hiding your flag and searching for theirs. Last Flag is designed to be capture-the-flag-first, with every character, level, and gameplay element built around that experience. Mac notes that he found a paper from third grade where he wrote that he wanted to own a video game studio, and that while he and Dan had collaborated on projects including work with Imagine Dragons and various gaming studios, the studio had been in quiet development mode for years before the Summer Games Fest reveal. Jay, the producer on the project, shares that she entered the game industry as an English teacher at a Brazilian company helping teams parse external QA reports, discovered that organizing team priorities was essentially a producer role, and went on to work on Cobra Kai 2, The Walking Dead: Destinies, and other projects before joining Night Street Games because Last Flag gave her the rare chance to work on an original IP from the ground up. Eli Harris, who voices Julius Reeves in the game, is welcomed into the conversation by Kahlief, who describes him as the smooth kind of fellow. The episode features the Summer Games Fest trailer and Kahlief expresses genuine enthusiasm for the CTF mode, noting it was his favorite mode in Halo and that he lamented how few players sought it out. The conversation touches on Night Street's connection to Imagine Dragons, who co-founders previously collaborated with, and the studio's aspiration to bring a 70s aesthetic and the childhood memory of outdoor capture-the-flag into a dedicated game.

As heard by us

A focused conversation that treats Last Flag as a real design problem.

Khalif Adams brings the Night Street Games team and Eli Harris onto Spawn on Me to talk about Last Flag after the Summer Games Fest trailer. The episode keeps its focus on capture the flag, but it does not stay abstract for long.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a capture-the-flag shooter pitch that gets into the work, not the sizzle.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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