An independent developer has taken down a zombie shooter set in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood and issued a public apology after city officials condemned the game for portraying residents as zombies. The title, called Tenderloin Night Shift, was removed from its online platform and the developer, Pierre-Louis Biojout, said the project showed poor judgment.
Biojout built the first-person shooter over the course of a weekend using OpenAI's Codex, a process often described as vibe coding. The Tenderloin is known for high crime rates and a large unhoused population, and it is frequently compared to Los Angeles's Skid Row. In the game, players use a gun to clear the neighborhood of zombies. Some of the undead wear construction uniforms or ride motorized scooters, others wear food delivery backpacks as if infected on the job, and still others are depicted doing the « fentanyl fold », a posture in which the body bends forward at the waist, commonly associated with fentanyl users.
Biojout said on social media that San Francisco « couldn't fix the tenderloin, so I monetized it. » In the game he sold digital ad space for $100 per week, and some of the real-world companies on the billboards inside his polygonal recreation of the neighborhood were paid placements. The project drew quick attention from city leaders. Mayor Daniel Lurie told NBC Bay Area: « There's no accounting for taste or people's terrible ideas. This is a bad one, and we reject it. It doesn't speak for San Francisco values. »
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who represents the Tenderloin, called the game « deeply disturbing and unacceptable » in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle. « Turning violence against real people, including unhoused people, into entertainment is dehumanizing and should never be normalized, » he said, adding that he was encouraged that most San Franciscans recognized the game crossed a line.
Biojout had initially promoted the backlash on his social media accounts before removing the game from the website of NanoCorp AI, a platform that runs online businesses using AI agents. He later issued a public apology. He said he had been inspired by an Alcatraz-themed Call of Duty map and often passes through the Tenderloin on his way to work. « The game was not intended to provoke or to depict shooting real people, » he told the Chronicle, adding that its characters drew on a broad cross-section of San Francisco, including people who work in tech. He told NBC Bay Area that the game was not meant to target any particular demographic or group.
Biojout also refunded advertisers who had promoted the game, deleted all of his social media posts about it, and donated the game's total revenue to the Delancey Street Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit that provides rehabilitation services and vocational training to people with substance use disorders and formerly incarcerated people. In a post on X, he wrote: « I built and posted a zombie game set on San Francisco streets. The setting and the way I promoted it showed poor judgment. Targeting people struggling with addiction or homelessness was never my intention. »