Mikey Gilder, co-founder and CMO of Avantris, was drowning. Deep into production on The Crooked Moon, a dark D&D horror epic, the creative weight had become crushing. He was ready to walk away from the project entirely when a concert changed everything.
"Being in that deep dark horror for so long creatively takes a toll on you," Gilder recalls. "I was on the cliff. I was ready to give up." Then he attended a show by synthwave band The Midnight. "I was injected with spiritual fuel and that was enough to keep me going to get The Crooked Moon done."
That burst of inspiration rippled outward. It didn't just save The Crooked Moon. It sparked an entirely new project: Neon Odyssey, a sweeping space opera for Dungeons & Dragons 5.5E. The trilogy spans over 1,400 pages and unfolds across the galaxy of Stardust Rhapsody, complete with neon megacities, alien worlds, space stations, and starships designed to give players and Game Masters everything needed for cinematic sci-fi adventures.
The connection between Gilder's creative renewal and The Midnight proved so genuine that Avantris decided to bring the band in as collaborators. The Midnight created an original song that anchors Neon Odyssey's launch trailer and music video, establishing the tone and energy of the entire world.
Tim McEwan, a founding member of The Midnight, grew up gaming on the Sega Genesis in Europe and approached the project with unexpected ease. "I don't recall seeing any visuals," McEwan says of the songwriting process. "We didn't need to see visuals in order to understand the emotions behind the storytelling." His bandmate Tyler Lyle handled the lyrics while McEwan built the instrumental foundation. "It was such a fun, easygoing experience that it sort of came together really nicely."
For Gilder, the partnership became essential to shaping Neon Odyssey's identity. The world draws from multiple sources: Star Wars provides the archetypal space opera framework, while Cowboy Bebop contributes a melancholic undercurrent of nostalgia and the intimacy of personal problems over galactic destruction.
"It's Star Wars meets Cowboy Bebop with a synthwave coat of paint," Gilder explains. The synthwave influence isn't window dressing. It carries themes of loss, wistfulness, and the bittersweetness of looking back. "When you watch Star Wars, it hits something in your soul. It's playing on the hero's journey that has existed for thousands of years." But Neon Odyssey tempers that epic scope with Cowboy Bebop's quieter focus. "It's not an evil galactic empire blowing up massive space stations. It's dealing with the very personal problems of a group of people. And sometimes they win and sometimes they lose."
McEwan found himself drawn to the thematic territory immediately. "You want us to do a song about nostalgia and loss and the hero's journey? We can do that," he says. "We were kids in a candy store. Nostalgia has a built-in sadness. It's that idea of this moment will never come back and that's why it's beautiful."
The Midnight's approach to music starts with emotion and cinematic resonance rather than literal interpretation. McEwan cites the 1982 Steven Spielberg film ET as an example of what he aims to capture: wonder, loss of innocence, and heartbreak. He doesn't always know what listeners will feel when they hear his work, but he's learned that when he targets a specific emotion, fans often create videos using films that match the feeling he was pursuing. "I don't know what other people are going to experience when they listen to our music, but the many times that I've tried to evoke a specific feeling in a track, people will make fan-made video edits and they will use the movies I had in my head when I was making the track."
Building Neon Odyssey required resources far beyond what Avantris started with. The company has grown to over 30 contributors working across the globe. The world includes bizarre fauna inspired by unlikely sources: space whales and space dolphins born from Ecco the Dolphin, a 1992 Genesis game about a dolphin navigating underwater worlds. Gilder credits the expanded team for pushing the project's quality upward. "We're getting better at it every day," he says, hoping that Neon Odyssey will reflect both the scale of the vision and the collective effort required to realize it.
Author Emily Chen: "When a concert can save a creative project and launch a new one, that's the kind of synergy the gaming industry needs more of."
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