The trailer for Join Us first appeared in the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulation. In the clip, robed cultists zoom around on pig‑mounted vehicles, brandishing machine guns, before the screen fades to a massive, Cthulhu‑like mass of tentacles. One weapon that didn’t make the final cut of the teaser was the infamous "snake gun," a quirky armament that still lives in the finished game. "A team member’s son asked, ‘What if there’s a snake gun?’" recalls Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of the developing studio, Wolf Haus Games.
"Because we had a scalable gun‑building tool, I whipped up a snake‑shooting weapon in about thirty minutes. The kid went nuts, and we kept it in the game." That anecdote captures the chaotic, over‑the‑top gameplay that Join Us promises: an open‑world sandbox where players can gather followers—or partner up with friends—to run a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first mindset, a strategy that has allowed a small crew to produce a high‑fidelity title that would normally require a much larger workforce.
Michael Abbott, the studio’s chief operating officer, summed up the ambition succinctly: "We wanted to be disruptors." "We kept hearing, ‘You can’t build a game of that scope with only a dozen people.’" Abbott said. "But we’d already learned to punch well above our weight in indie filmmaking, so we decided to prove the skeptics wrong." After a grueling series of eighty pitches, the team finally secured equity financing from both Krafton and Lifelike Capital, giving Wolf Haus the runway needed to bring Join Us to life. The founders’ Hollywood pedigree runs deep.
Dietsch studied film at Chapman University, where he met 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 was instrumental in launching Ascendant Pictures, the production company founded by Chris Roberts before he moved on to the ambitious space‑sim Star Citizen.
Abbott also produced a number of films, including the 2024 action picture Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s experimentation with Unreal Engine. "The engine was free to download, and I’d been a gamer for as long as I could remember, but the barrier to actually building something seemed huge," he explained. After learning the basics from YouTube tutorials, he built a few tiny prototypes before deciding to chase a larger vision.
The concept that stuck was a doomsday cult simulator—a mash‑up of survival mechanics, grindhouse cinema aesthetics, and the narrative hooks he loved from both movies and games. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, assuming it would eventually hit a technical wall that would force him to abandon the idea. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter saw potential and presented it to Dooma, the company that would later become a key publishing partner. Dooma Wendschuh, who serves as both chief financial officer and narrative director at Wolf Haus, entered the gaming arena after a career in film production and screenwriting.
In the early 2000s he founded Sekretagent Productions, providing writing services for titles such as Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. He later built a portfolio of tech ventures, the most lucrative of which was the cannabis‑formulation business Ebbu, sold for roughly C$430 million (about $330 million USD). Wendschuh’s life took a surprising turn when he bought a tiny restaurant on a remote Canadian island, intending to retire peacefully. Yet a call from his former Hollywood‑hillroommate Michael Abbott changed his plans.
"I was about to settle into a quiet life, then my old friend rang and said a friend of his had made a video game," Wendschuh recalled. "I looked at what Joe had built, and it completely blew my mind—so I came out of retirement." Through his network, Wendschuh introduced the project to Reid Schneider, a former vice‑president at Warner Bros. Games who now heads the team behind Journey to the Savage Planet at Raccoon Logic.
Schneider joined as a strategic advisor and helped recruit Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, an ex‑Ubisoft Montreal programmer, to serve as chief technology officer. With the core team assembled, the next hurdle was funding—a challenging task given the industry’s downturn in the summer of 2023. "People would see what we were building and say, ‘That looks cool,’ but the market was tight," said Dietsch.
The studio enlisted the representation of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in Los Angeles, refined their pitch, and eventually secured a seed round from Lifelike Capital and Krafton in early 2024. Wendschuh believes the CAA connection—home to agents for titles such as 007: First Light—was instrumental, as was the presence of seasoned veterans like Schneider and Chartrand. "My agent Derek Douglas, who also handled my game‑making years, was the head of the video‑game department at William Morris, which gave us credibility," Wendschuh noted. Regardless of the pedigree, the most striking fact about Join Us is its development footprint: only thirteen full‑time staff members.
"We entered the project with a clear understanding of its scope, yet we wanted to preserve a small‑team culture where every voice matters and everyone can touch the creative core," said Dietsch. To achieve such ambition with a lean crew, the studio invested heavily in bespoke tools early in the pipeline.
"If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," Dietsch explained. The team built a modular toolkit that could grow alongside the open‑world map, preventing the project from collapsing under its own weight. In practice, the first year of development was split between designing gameplay concepts and constructing the very tools that would later enable those concepts to be realized.
The financing structure also gave the studio breathing room to perfect its tools. Both Krafton and Lifelike hold equity stakes, meaning the majority of the development budget came directly from them. "The game is essentially self‑funded," Wendschuh said.
"We’ve only taken on a modest amount of project finance for marketing, but the core development has been covered by our investors." Equity funding aligns the investors’ interests with the studio’s long‑term value creation, encouraging them to support the extensive tool‑building ethos. "Whenever we encounter a problem we don’t know how to solve, we simply build a custom tool to address it," Dietsch noted.
"It may slow us down in the short term, but it empowers a tiny team to produce a game of this scale." In an industry buzzing about generative AI, Wolf Haus deliberately avoids it for creative work. "We don’t use any generative AI in the making of the game," said Dietsch. "The human touch is essential to why we get up every morning." Wendschuh added, "We have a few AI subscriptions for administrative tasks like calendar management and email drafts, but nothing that touches the creative pipeline." Even Krafton, which publicly positioned itself as an "AI‑first" company, required assurance that its investment would not be used for AI‑driven asset creation. "They wanted to be certain we weren’t relying on AI to generate the game," Wendschuh explained, echoing similar statements from Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio that publicly distanced itself from the parent’s AI pivot.
The team’s philosophy extends to voice work and environmental design. The six‑kilometer‑square map in Join Us is hand‑crafted, and all 15,000 dialogue lines were recorded by human actors—an intentional choice to preserve authenticity.
Dietsch finds the immediacy of game development especially rewarding compared to film. In cinema, an idea can take years to materialize, with countless approvals needed before a director can see it on set. In games, an inspiration can be prototyped in a matter of hours, placed directly into the engine, and instantly experienced.
Wendschuh highlighted the contrast in production pipelines: "Film is heavily front‑loaded. You need a star director or A‑list talent to get a studio’s green light, and the odds of a low‑budget indie film breaking through are slim. Game development, by contrast, has far fewer gatekeepers.
You can ship a successful title without a celebrity endorsement." Both he and Dietsch agree that the core creative drive—telling a story and delivering an experience—remains the same across both mediums. "When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games. It came down to a coin toss and whether I got a camera for Christmas," Dietsch reminisced. "I learned to program on a TI‑83, so the love for both formats has always been there.
The medium changes, but the desire to engage an audience stays the same."