The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous co‑op cult simulator where robed followers zip around on pigs, unleash machine‑gun fire, and eventually confront colossal, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. One element that didn’t make the final cut was the infamous "snake gun," a quirky weapon that CEO and creative director Joe Dietsch says was born from a simple suggestion by a team member’s child. "His son asked, ‘Can there be a snake gun?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool, so within about thirty minutes I built a gun that shoots snakes.
It blew his mind, and it stayed in the game," Dietsch recalls. That anecdote captures the chaotic, sandbox‑style gameplay Join Us promises: an open‑world survival experience where players can recruit followers—or other players in co‑op mode—to join a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has enabled a high‑fidelity title to be built by a remarkably small crew.
"We set out to be disruptors," says Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer. "We told everyone we could deliver a AAA‑level product with just twelve people. Most people laughed, saying it was impossible." The team’s confidence stems from a history of achieving big results on modest budgets.
Abbott notes, "We come from indie filmmaking, so we’re accustomed to punching far above our weight." After 80 pitch meetings, Wolf Haus finally secured equity investment from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took stakes in the studio. The founders’ Hollywood pedigree runs deep.
Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson and another Wolf Haus co‑founder. Together they 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 founded by Chris Roberts before his Star Citizen days.
Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s early experiments in Unreal Engine.
"Unreal was free to download, and I’d always loved games, but the barrier to actually creating something felt huge," he explains. He taught himself through YouTube tutorials, built a few small prototypes, and eventually gravitated toward a doomsday‑cult simulator—a concept that fused his love of survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema. He created a proof‑of‑concept demo, showed it to Abbott, and the idea was taken to Dooma for further development.
Dooma Wendschuh, Wolf Haus’s CFO and narrative director, began his career as a film producer and screenwriter before transitioning to 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 company Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million (about $330 million USD). After that windfall he bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire.
"I thought I was done, but a call from my old Hollywood‑hill roommate Michael Abbott pulled me back in," Wendschuh says. He was impressed by Dietsch’s demo and agreed to help. Wendschuh introduced the project to Reid Schneider, former VP at Warner Bros.
Games and now head of Raccoon Logic, the studio behind Journey to the Savage Planet. Schneider became a strategic advisor and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as chief technology officer. With the core team in place, the next hurdle was financing—a daunting task during the industry downturn of 2023‑24.
"People liked what we were building but the market was tough," Dietsch admits. The studio enlisted CAA in Los Angeles, re‑pitched throughout 2024, and eventually closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton. Wendschuh believes CAA’s connections, along with veteran advisors like Schneider and Chartrand, were decisive.
Despite the high ambitions, Join Us is being developed by just 13 full‑time staff. "We entered the project with a clear sense of scope and wanted to keep the team small enough that everyone’s voice matters," says Dietsch. To make a large‑scale open world feasible, the studio invested heavily in custom tooling from day one. "Any system in the game has to be scalable and debuggable by a single person," he explains.
The first year was split between ideating gameplay and building the underlying toolset, a strategy that also lays groundwork for future titles. The equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike allowed Wolf Haus to self‑finance development, using the capital primarily for tool creation and later modest project‑finance for marketing.
"Our investors are motivated to increase the studio’s enterprise value, so they support our tool‑heavy approach," Wendschuh notes. This philosophy means that whenever a technical obstacle appears, the team builds a bespoke tool to solve it, even if it slows short‑term progress, because it enables a tiny crew to achieve a massive vision. When asked about generative AI, Dietsch is unequivocal: the studio does not employ it for creative work. "We value the human touch.
Turning development over to an AI would defeat why we get up each morning," he says. Wendschuh adds that while they may use AI for mundane tasks like calendar management, it plays no role in design, art, or writing. Krafton, despite branding itself as an "AI‑first" company, explicitly required Wolf Haus to avoid generative AI in the creative pipeline, mirroring a similar stance taken by Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio.
The commitment to handcrafted content is evident: the six‑kilometre‑square map in Join Us is entirely hand‑built, and the game features roughly 15,000 voice lines recorded by human actors. Dietsch stresses that even as an indie, preserving that level of artisanal detail was non‑negotiable. Dietsch also reflects on the contrast between film and game creation. In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring approvals, casting, and studio green‑lights.
In games, an idea can be prototyped within hours, placed directly into the engine, and iterated on instantly. "That immediacy is exhilarating," he says. Wendschuh agrees, noting that film production is front‑loaded with high‑stakes negotiations for a few marquee names, whereas games have far fewer gatekeepers. "You don’t need an A‑list actor or director to make a successful game," he observes.
Both mediums, however, share a core purpose: delivering an experience, telling a story, and engaging an audience. Dietsch’s childhood fascination with both cameras and calculators set him on a path that could have diverged dramatically, but ultimately led to the creation of Join Us—a testament to the power of small, passionate teams, deep industry roots, and a refusal to rely on generative AI for the creative heart of a game.