The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulator. In the preview, robed cultists rode on pigs while firing machine guns, culminating in a shot of enormous, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. What didn’t make the cut, according to Joe Dietsch—CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games—was the infamous snake gun.
"One of the developers’ kids suggested a snake‑shooting weapon," Dietsch recalls. "We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that let us spin up a new gun in about thirty minutes, so I built a snake‑gun on the fly. The kid went wild, and the weapon stayed in the final build." That anecdote captures the chaotic, over‑the‑top gameplay that Join Us promises: an open‑world sandbox where players can recruit followers—or invite friends in co‑op—to build a 1970s‑style cult empire. It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first philosophy, which has enabled a high‑fidelity, large‑scale title to be produced by a remarkably small team.
Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed it up: “We set out to be disruptors. We told everyone we could deliver a AAA‑ish experience with just twelve people, and they laughed.” The team’s confidence wasn’t unfounded.
Their members came from indie‑film backgrounds where they routinely punched far above their budgets. After 80 pitches, they finally secured equity investment from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took stakes in Wolf Haus. The founders’ Hollywood pedigree runs deep. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson—son of Mel Gibson—and the two later co‑wrote and co‑directed the indie features Happy Hunting and Manifest West.
Abbott is the son of veteran makeup artist Larry Abbott and helped launch Ascendant Pictures, the production company started by Chris Roberts before he turned his attention to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84, starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s early tinkering in Unreal Engine.
"Unreal was free to download, and I’d been a gamer forever, but the barrier to actually create something felt huge," he explains. He taught himself through YouTube tutorials, built a few tiny prototypes, and eventually settled on a doomsday‑cult simulation that fused survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics.
He built a proof‑of‑concept, showed it to Abbott, and the concept was handed off to Dooma for further development. Dooma Wendschuh, Wolf Haus’s CFO and narrative director, began his career as a film producer and screenwriter before moving into games in the early 2000s. He founded Sekretagent Productions, providing narrative work for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. Later, he launched several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis formulation firm Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million (about $330 million USD).
After that windfall, he bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire. Yet a call from his old Hollywood‑hill roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back into game development when he saw Dietsch’s demo and was “blown away.” Wendschuh then introduced Reid Schneider—a former Warner Bros.
Games vice president now heading Raccoon Logic, the studio behind Journey to the Savage Planet—as a strategic advisor. Schneider recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, an ex‑Ubisoft Montreal programmer, to serve as chief technology officer.
With that leadership core in place, the studio turned to fundraising. Pitching began in the summer of 2023, a period marked by a broader industry downturn.
Despite the challenging climate, the team’s connections—particularly through CAA, which also represents titles like 007: First Light—helped them land seed funding from Lifelike Capital and Krafton in 2024. Even with high‑profile backers, Wolf Haus deliberately kept its headcount tiny—13 full‑time staff members at the time of writing.
"We entered the project knowing exactly what we wanted to achieve," says Dietsch, "but we also wanted a small‑team culture where every voice matters and everyone can touch the creative side." To make an ambitious open‑world game feasible with such a lean crew, the studio invested heavily in custom tooling from day one. "Any system we build must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," Dietsch notes. The first year of development was split between designing gameplay concepts and building the internal tools that would later allow those concepts to scale across a six‑kilometre‑square map without collapsing under their own weight. This tooling‑first approach also aligns with the equity investors’ philosophy.
"Krafton and Lifelike want us to increase the studio’s enterprise value, so they support our extensive tool‑building," explains Wendschuh. "We may develop a tool even if it slows immediate progress, because it enables us to deliver a massive game with a micro‑team." When asked about generative AI—a hot topic in the industry—Dietsch gave a blunt answer: "We don’t use any generative AI in the creative process.
The human touch is essential to us." Wendschuh adds that the studio only employs AI for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting. Interestingly, Krafton, which recently branded itself as an "AI‑first" company, explicitly required Wolf Haus to avoid generative AI in game creation, mirroring similar statements from Krafton‑owned Neon Giant. The commitment to handcrafted content runs deep.
The entire six‑kilometre map is hand‑built, and the game features roughly 15,000 voice lines recorded by human actors—an effort that the team deemed non‑negotiable, even for a small indie studio. Dietsch reflects on the contrast between filmmaking and game development. In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring countless approvals and the involvement of high‑profile talent to secure a studio green‑light.
In games, however, an inspiration can be coded into the engine within hours, offering immediate feedback and iteration. "You can have an idea at breakfast and see it in the engine by lunch," he says, highlighting the immediacy that attracted him to the medium. Wendschuh observes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with intense, costly set‑ups and a reliance on star power to attract financing. While anyone can shoot a backyard movie, breaking through without marquee names is rare.
By contrast, the video‑game market has far fewer gatekeepers, allowing small teams to achieve commercial success without A‑list talent. Both founders agree that whether you’re making a movie or a game, the core mission is the same: to craft an experience, tell a story, and engage an audience. Dietsch’s childhood love of both mediums—programming on a TI‑83 calculator and dreaming of a camera for Christmas—has culminated in Join Us, a project that blends his cinematic sensibilities with interactive design, proving that a small, determined crew can indeed disrupt the status quo.