The developer of a zombie shooter set in the Tenderloin shut it down Friday after city officials and other San Francisco residents said it portrayed homeless people as monsters to be killed.
Pierre-Louis Biojout, founder of an artificial intelligence startup who used his own company to monetize the game “Tenderloin Night Shift,” said he would also donate to a local nonprofit helping drug addicts, the homeless and formerly incarcerated people.
“The setting and manner in which I promoted it demonstrated poor judgment. Targeting people struggling with addiction or the homeless was never my intention. I removed the game and promotional posts, refunded all advertisers, and made a personal donation to Delancey Street Treatment and Recovery Services equal to the game’s total revenue,” he said on X.
Biojout previously told the Chronicle that the game was inspired by a “Call of Duty” map of Alcatraz and did not target the homeless, but contained fictional zombies based on a range of local populations. Some included people dressed as security guards and construction workers, but the haters also included “the bent,” a clear reference to the “fentanyl kink,” in which opioid users are bent over at the waist.
The game included local markers like a Waymo car, scooters, and a rental ad for a “Tendernob” studio. Biojout said he walks around the neighborhood twice a day on his way to the office.
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who represents the Tenderloin, said Thursday that violent gameplay was “dehumanizing and should never be normalized.” A spokesperson for the city attorney’s office called it “abhorrent.”
Biojout created the game in a weekend using OpenAI’s Codex and then sold digital ad space starting at $100 per week, run by his startup, NanoCorp. “San Francisco couldn’t fix the net. So I monetized it,” Biojout posted Tuesday. He later said the game grossed more than $300.
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