INDIE SPOTLIGHT

The Lucky Kat who gained an extra life

How a life-changing experience helped Herdjie Zhou pursue his dream.

Four years ago, 29-year-old Herdjie Zhou was out jogging. Until, suddenly, he wasn’t.

When he awoke he found himself in hospital. He was told he’d just had a cardiac arrest.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a football player just drop on the floor in the middle of the game – the same happened to me,” Zhou tells us. “I just dropped. And woke up in hospital – I was really, really lucky to be alive.”

Zhou is fine now, thank goodness, but his experience made him think hard about what he wanted to do with his life. He had worked as a stock market trader and was running a small retail chain, and that was fine – but his real passion was videogames.

The Lucky Kat founders, brothers Herdjie (left) and Hernan Zhou (right).

“Right before it happened, my brother Hernan and I were discussing starting a gaming company together,” says Zhou. “I was very insecure about the games industry – I knew it was a very challenging business to be in. Of course, that changed after I got out of hospital. Why not give it a try?”

With Herdjie fully recovered, the Zhou brothers set about making their dream a reality. And they named their new venture Lucky Kat, for a couple of reasons. “My parents had a Chinese restaurant and they worked very hard,” Herdjie tells us. “We always had this lucky cat thing at the cashier, so we thought it’d be a cool name for us. And it really fits the story of what happened to me, too.”

The duo stuck with the feline theme for their first game. 2015 debut Nom Cat was all about feeding hungry moggies until they burst. And Zhou wanted as many familiar felines in the game as possible.

“I started calling all of these people who run Facebook pages about their cat with millions of likes,” says Zhou. “And it turns out all of these internet celebrity cat people all know each other. Once we got the ‘smaller’ cats in the game, the ‘bigger’ cats got on board…”

Soon enough, the likes of Grumpy Cat, Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat were in Nom Cat. Even Garfield joined the cast, further boosting the profile of the game online.

Nom Cat’s success was the springboard for an astoundingly productive spell for the Dutch studio, which released three games in 2016: aerial platformer Sky Chasers, Pokémon-style adventure Combo Critters and quickfire minigame collection Grumpy Cats Worst Game Ever. The latter – a collaboration with the miserable moggy herself – became its biggest success to date.

2017 brought us retro brawler Beat Street, drag racer Road Warriors and Wacky Face – a game playable with your face using iPhone X.

And its latest game, Thunderdogs, is a terrific shoot ‘em up which brings new meaning to the term ‘dogfighting’.

So four years after that life-changing moment, Lucky Kat is flourishing. And although the circumstances that led to Zhou’s career change were traumatic, he says that he wouldn’t swap it for his former life.

“Being in games has brought me so much joy and excitement,” he adds. “Your perspective on life changes after an event like that. Life is too short to be doing things that you don't love to do. Go for it.”