A Tech Founder Made $300 Shooting Zombies in SF's Tenderloin

The zombie was named "the folded." It walked hunched at the waist, a posture doctors associate with fentanyl use, and players shot it for sport on a street that actually exists: Eddy and Jones, in San Francisco's Tenderloin.

That is not a metaphor. Created by developer Pierre-Louis Biojout, "Tenderloin Night Shift" is a free browser-based shooter that turns a recognizable stretch of SF into a zombie battlefield. Biojout said he built it using ChatGPT's Codex in a weekend. He had never shipped a game before.

The tools worked exactly as advertised, and that's the problem. Nothing in the stack that let Biojout ship a multiplayer browser shooter in 48 hours also asks whether the shooter should exist.

The Post That Wrote Its Own Backlash

"San Francisco couldn't fix the Tenderloin," Biojout said in a now-deleted X post on Sunday, Oct. 13. "So I monetized it Call of Duty style zombie shooter on the real SF streets."

Translation: a neighborhood with the city's highest concentration of poverty and open addiction is now a content asset, and the founder is proud enough of the arbitrage to post the receipts. By Thursday, Oct. 17, that post drew nearly 500,000 views and generated $300 in in-game ad sales, Biojout said.

The response from residents was unambiguous. Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the SF Coalition on Homelessness, said Biojout was "monetizing the dehumanization and pretend killing for fun of mostly Black and Brown residents of the poorest neighborhood in San Francisco." A Tenderloin resident told the Chronicle he was appalled to discover his own block was in the game.

Biojout's initial answer was not an apology. It was a shrug. When another tech founder asked why he'd made a game about shooting people in active addiction, Biojout said: "It's a zombie shooter."

That's the line you say when you've confused "I can defend this technically" with "this was a good idea."

The Climbdown

Four days after the post, Friday, Oct. 18, Biojout took "Tenderloin Night Shift" offline, saying the promotion showed "poor judgment." He said targeting people struggling with addiction or homelessness "was never my intention," refunded all advertisers, and donated $300 to Delancey Street equal to the game's total revenue.

The apology cost less than a mid-tier GPU rental.

The weekend build was never the issue; pointing it at a specific, named real address was. Removing build friction with AI tools did not remove the friction of asking a second person whether this was a terrible idea, because that friction was never in the tool. It was supposed to be in the founder.

What to watch

Watch whether NanoCorp, which advertised inside the game, faces scrutiny from Y Combinator over the episode. Watch whether Biojout's claim that AI coding tools let a first-time developer ship in a weekend becomes a cautionary slide instead of a bragging right. The test isn't whether they can build something controversial by Monday. It's whether anyone asks them not to.