Pierre-Louis Biojout’s tenderloin night shift game shutdown arrived fast on Tuesday, when Night Shift landed online and drew immediate backlash. The multiplayer shooter is set in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and turns neighborhood residents into zombie targets.
Biojout posted the trailer on social media with a line that made the pitch plain: “San Francisco couldn’t fix the Tenderloin. So I monetized it Call of Duty-style zombie shooter on the real SF streets. Multiplayer, in your browser.” He also said the game had already generated $300 in advertising revenue.
Jones and Eddy streets
Night Shift uses familiar streets around Jones and Eddy streets, and the trailer shows zombies hunched over on sidewalks and riding Lime scooters. It also includes Waymo vehicles, Tesla Cybertrucks, and AI billboards, pushing the game’s real-world setting far beyond a generic dystopian backdrop.
The most pointed image is “the folded,” a zombie character described as a posture associated with fentanyl use in which a person bends forward at the waist while remaining on their feet. That choice turned the release into a local argument about whether the game was satire, provocation, or plain exploitation.
San Francisco and NanoCorp
Biojout founded NanoCorp in 2023 and said he built Night Shift over a single weekend using AI coding tools, despite having no previous video game development experience. That makes the release less like a polished studio launch and more like a low-friction product shipped straight into a live controversy.
Critics reacted immediately to the portrayal of people dealing with homelessness and addiction, and the game’s depiction of Black characters also drew criticism for using racist tropes. One commenter wrote, “A zombie game based on an inactive prison is different than you monetizing shooting unhoused drug addicts,” while another wrote, “Bring back shame.”
Call of Duty-style fallout
Biojout framed the game as a response to what he said San Francisco could not fix, but the backlash came from the same place the game tried to monetize: the Tenderloin itself. Night Shift turns a real neighborhood into a browser shooter, and that is the part that made the outrage immediate, local, and hard to separate from the residents it depicts.
What matters now is the distribution question. The release has already triggered public criticism, but the available information does not show whether Night Shift is still online or has been taken down, which leaves its status as the next thing readers would need to check before assuming the controversy has ended.
