At 18, doctors gave him 3 hours to live. At 35, this founder built a multi-million game studio

'Games like League of Legends weren’t really made to help me, but in the end, they basically saved my life,' Zhenghua Yang said.

At 18, Zhenghua Yang’s freshman year at the University of Illinois in 2008 was supposed to be ordinary—classes, late nights, and campus life. Instead, weeks into the semester, his world collapsed. On Halloween, a sudden nosebleed turned into a medical emergency. Yang’s body was critically short of blood platelets, and doctors warned he had only three hours to live. What followed was two years in and out of hospitals, fighting a rare condition that nearly ended his life, Fortune reported.

During that ordeal, Yang found refuge in video games like League of Legends, Minecraft, and World of Warcraft. “Games like League of Legends weren’t really made to help me, but in the end, they basically saved my life,” Yang told the publication. “What if I start making games with the intention to help people? What kind of power would that be able to unlock?”

Those questions stayed with him when he transferred to the University of Colorado Boulder to study business. With just $1,000, Yang launched Serenity Forge—a game development and publishing studio built on a mission he wrote between lectures: “We create meaningful and emotionally impactful experiences that challenge the way you think.”

Today, Serenity Forge employs more than 40 people and has published around 70 titles, including Lifeless Planet and Doki Doki Literature Club, which has been downloaded 30 million times. The studio brings in between $10 million and $15 million annually. But for Yang, success isn’t about revenue or downloads—it’s about impact.

“There will be all these fans, teenagers, that would line up, talk to me. They will cry, they would give me hugs and tell me, ‘you’re the reason that I realised that I was in an abusive relationship and I’m now way healthier and way happier because of the art that you created,’” Yang told Fortune. “That, I think, has always been the thing that drives me way more so than the bottom line or like your employee count or all the other stuff.”