A San Francisco tech founder has built a free, browser-based zombie shooter set on real Tenderloin street corners, and he says it took him just one weekend to make using AI coding tools. The game's creator says it had generated at least $300 in ad sales, and it has triggered a wave of online anger accusing him of turning the neighborhood's overdose crisis into entertainment.
Pierre-Louis Biojout, the game's creator, described it as a Call of Duty-style zombie shooter set on actual San Francisco streets, as reported by the New York Post. He claimed he built the multiplayer browser game in a single weekend using OpenAI's Codex tool and had never made a video game before, framing the project as proof that generative AI lets a single developer ship something playable almost overnight, according to a Reddit thread tracking the release. The game features zombies roaming San Francisco streets, including, in one widely shared detail, a zombie riding a Lime scooter.
Biojout is not a traditional game developer. A graduate of École Polytechnique, he co-founded the Y Combinator-backed startup Phospho in 2023 and built the LLM-colosseum AI benchmarking project. He now lives in San Francisco and is the founder of NanoCorp, which builds autonomous micro-businesses from text prompts and charges a 20% withdrawal fee, according to the French Tech Journal and Preuve AI. A September 2026 review by Preuve AI, citing NanoCorp's July 2026 weekly update, reported that fewer than 1% of its 30,000 created entities had generated any revenue at all.
Why Not?, Says the Developer
The Post reports that critics piled on quickly, with one commenter calling Biojout a huge piece of s–t and another branding the launch atrocious public relations. Biojout, for his part, reportedly argued that San Francisco couldn't fix the Tenderloin, so he monetized it instead — and when a commenter told him the game wasn't cool, his response was simply, why not?
Not everyone piled on. Some supporters argued the city, not the game's creator, deserved the criticism, with one commenter telling the Post that San Francisco created and refuses to fix an urban wasteland. At least one gamer praised the title as the best game they'd played all year, the outlet's reporting shows.
A Crisis the Game Doesn't Depict
The backlash lands against the backdrop of a genuine public health emergency. San Francisco recorded a peak of 806 fatal accidental drug overdoses in 2023, more than 80% of them involving fentanyl, concentrated heavily in high-poverty districts like the Tenderloin, according to CBS News, which called it the deadliest year for overdoses in the city's recorded history. UCSF researchers have tied part of that surge to the city's December 2022 closure of the temporary Tenderloin Center, a harm-reduction site that had reversed more than 330 overdoses before it shut down, per HealthRIGHT 360.
It's not the first time footage out of the Tenderloin has drawn comparisons to zombies. Hoodline reported in May 2026 that viral videos depicting drug-incapacitated individuals near 7th and Market streets as zombies sparked public backlash, though police noted the footage predated recent multi-agency enforcement operations in the neighborhood. That same month, Tenderloin residents and business owners dismissed a federal quality-of-life lawsuit against the city after a judge denied an injunction accusing officials of treating the district as a containment zone for open-air drug markets, according to the City of San Francisco; the suit had originally been filed in March 2024.
Homelessness Numbers Behind the Backlash
San Francisco's 2024 Point-in-Time count recorded 8,323 homeless individuals citywide, and overall homelessness grew 7% between 2022 and 2024, per KALW.
Why the Game Itself Is Legal
However distasteful critics find the premise, legal experts note that violent video game content enjoys strong constitutional protection. In the 2011 case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that video games are protected speech under the First Amendment, striking down a California law that tried to restrict the sale of violent games to minors, according to Oyez. That precedent recognizes video games as protected speech under the First Amendment.
For now, Biojout appears unmoved by the criticism. The game remains live and free to play.
