Pierre-Louis Biojout’s free browser game, Tenderloin Night Shift, placed players at Eddy and Jones streets in a digitally recreated Tenderloin. They shot “zombies” amid familiar markers: delivery backpacks, scooters, a stalled Waymo and ads for AI companies. One enemy, “the Folded,” appeared to echo the posture associated with opioid use. Biojout said he built the game in a weekend with OpenAI’s Codex and tools from his startup, NanoCorp, then sold virtual billboard ads starting at $100 a week.¹

On Tuesday, Biojout promoted the game with a blunt sales pitch: “San Francisco couldn’t fix the Tenderloin. So I monetized it.” He later said it had brought in more than $300. But as the post spread, critics argued the joke was aimed at people already enduring addiction, homelessness and poverty—not at an abstract zombie apocalypse.²

Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, whose district includes the Tenderloin, called the game “deeply disturbing and unacceptable,” warning that “turning violence against real people, including unhoused people, into entertainment is dehumanizing and should never be normalized.” The city attorney’s office said the game did not reflect the neighborhood’s working families and described glorifying violence against neighbors as “abhorrent.”¹

Advocates and residents pressed the same point more sharply. Coalition on Homelessness director Jennifer Friedenbach said monetizing “pretend killing for fun” of largely Black and Brown residents reflected increasingly hateful public discourse; resident David Elliot Lewis called it an “incitement of violence.”¹

Biojout initially rejected the accusation that he was encouraging violence, calling the game a fictional shooter inspired by a Call of Duty Alcatraz level and saying its characters represented a broad cross-section of San Franciscans. Yet by Friday, he had reversed course. “The setting and the way I promoted it showed poor judgment,” he wrote, announcing that the game and promotional posts were down, advertisers refunded, and a matching personal donation made to Delancey Street treatment and recovery services.²