Worlds change. Styles change. Studios change.
The system survives.
That is not a compromise. That is the design.
Every short is a door. A story that begins and ends. A digital world you have never seen before, with its own rules, its own look, its own studio. But every door opens on the same corridor: Neo-Mars.
One studio is a bottleneck. One aesthetic is a cage. An anthology means every world can sound like itself, and no single point of failure can kill the IP. More studios, more aesthetics, one living system.
The Animatrix and Star Wars: Visions proved the model. Love, Death and Robots proved the technique. Black Mirror proved a theme can hold an anthology together. We do the one thing none of them did: every story lives in the same world.
Neo-Mars is where everything started. A mining outpost on an asteroid that became, in a couple of centuries, the first great city-state of the solar system. It fought Earth for its independence. That fight is not over.
Our lore travels through many digital worlds: some gorgeous, some brutal, some inhabited only by AIs. All of them are reached from here, and everything that happens there comes back here. It is 12026 on the Human Calendar: time moves on Neo-Mars as it moves for us, and the city grows while we grow.
We are building it for real. A navigable 3D Neo-Mars, raised from its street plan block by block, in public, with everyone who wants to help. When it stands, we hand it over: the whole city goes open source, in the hands of every holder. A base for games, stories and experiences we cannot even imagine yet.
Holders can use their character commercially and build under their own brand. Most projects stop there. We start there.
If your brand, project or creative identity respects our guidelines and gets approved, it enters Neo-Mars. Build a beer, and our characters drink it. Build a game, and our protagonists play it. Run a show, and you become the character who runs one. Under clear rules you can also carry our logo, Ryodan Official Licensed, so it is always clear the product is yours, under our license.
The brand stays yours. It lives inside our IP without depending on it, and when it makes sense we forge limited editions together, with our characters on your product. Not licensing as usual: co-branding across fiction and reality, where both sides grow and neither needs a leash on the other.
Every mint is a sealed Gatebreaker: the USB key MIA sends. No sender, no manual, no promises. Inside, your Ryodan is already waiting. Nobody knows which one.
The reveal is not automatic. It is a choice. Open your Gatebreaker, sacrifice the key, and your Ryodan steps out. Or keep it sealed, with everything it might contain.
Opening takes guts. Whoever does receives a soulbound token: permanent proof they took the risk.
Your mint is never at risk. Either Ryodan happens at full power, or it costs you nothing. The funds never touch our wallet: they wait in the contract until the outcome is decided.
Sold out: we build everything you have seen, funded in full from day one. Not sold out: the contract returns every mint. Automatically, to the last wei. No fine print, no half promises.
We are not improvising post-mint fantasies. We know what we want to build and what it costs to actually move. For three years I have been building that machine. What is still missing is the key. The sold out is that key.
For the believer it removes friction: no checking the mint in real time, no FOMO doing the thinking for you. For the holder, a sold out collection is proof of conviction: you are not holding a promise, you are holding proof. And let's not pretend a sold out has never made anyone smile.
Neo-Mars, 12026.
Every gate has a keeper.
On Neo-Mars we learned it the hard way: work, identity, access,
memory. Everything that matters passes through a door someone else
owns.
Cyberpunk never began with neon. It began with gates.
We are the Ryodan. A brigade, not an army.
We come from the digital worlds and we go back there, but every
mission leaves from this city and every consequence comes home to
it.
We do not ask permission to exist. We were never given any.
What we own, we own. Not rented, not revoked, not "free" in
exchange for who we are.
A key you can open or keep sealed. A name that is yours and no one
else's. A city no one owns, so everyone can live in it.
The Gatekeepers sell cleaner prisons.
We want a real exit.
We do not wait for the future to be handed down. We forge it, one glitch at a time, and we forge it together.
Code is our protest.
Blockchain is our weapon.
Freedom must be built.
Together, that is the Ryodan Resistance.
FOUNDERMaverZero · Pioneer Unit #0000
Luigi Romano, aka Gigio. Half French, half Italian, born 1982, Milan.
Programming in high school, then computer engineering, then the escape to design, which had been the real passion all along. He left university because he already had three jobs: graphic designer, IT, and a streetwear shop of his own, which also carried his first clothing brand.
He cut his teeth on the graphics of Milan's nightlife and, for the launch campaign of the first Games Week, turned the Naviglio into a giant luminous game of Tetris.
In 2011 he founded That's All Studio with Marco Ferrari: campaigns shot in New York and Los Angeles, work for Tod's, Coca-Cola and Disney. In recent years, the artwork of a couple of records that went number one in Italy, the logo of an animated series, and the campaign of an Italian IP on Netflix. Twenty years of design. Street art collector. Father.
Founder of MAVE and Ryodan. For three years he has been building this machine.
This project is the synthesis of everything I am: code, art, IP, and the need to see future tech become real.
Your unit, your rank, your keys: all of it lands here.