Controversy Over Tenderloin Night Shift Game
Pierre-Louis Biojout, founder of Y Combinator-backed AI startup NanoCorp, drew criticism this week after releasing a weekend-coded web shooter set in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, an area known for homelessness and drug use.
The game, called Tenderloin Night Shift, let players shoot “zombies” that included a “folded” fentanyl addict and a Black security guard, according to reports from the SF Chronicle and KRON4 news.
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the SF Coalition on Homelessness, told the Chronicle that Biojout was “monetizing the dehumanization and pretend killing for fun of mostly Black and Brown residents of the poorest neighborhood in San Francisco.”
In a correspondence with the paper, Biojout said he had not intended to “provoke or to depict shooting real people” and that the game also included tech workers as characters.
The game appears to have been taken down from NanoCorp’s website, and although Biojout deleted his X post, the controversy persists.
“You made a game about shooting people in active addiction,” said another tech founder. “These are human beings, not zombies. show me the positive side of this – i’m probably blind.”
“Why are you talking about addiction? It’s a zombie shooter,” Biojout replied.
Some users defended the concept, with one posting on X, “They are currently NOT human beings,” one user, while another said they’d “train in bro’s game” to prepare to visit San Francisco.
