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 ride pigs, unleash machine‑gun fire, and eventually confront colossal, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. One detail that didn’t make the final cut was the infamous snake‑gun, a weapon that Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, says was born from a child’s imagination.
"My team member’s son asked if we could make a snake‑gun," Dietsch recalls. "We had a rapid‑prototyping tool, so in about thirty minutes I built a gun that fires snakes. He was thrilled, and the weapon stayed in the game." This anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit of Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival title that lets players recruit followers—or friends in co‑op mode—to build a 1970s‑style cult.
It also highlights the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has enabled a small team to produce a high‑fidelity experience that would normally require a much larger staff. Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, describes the team’s ambition as a deliberate disruption of industry norms. "We told everyone we could deliver a AAA‑level game with just twelve people," he says.
"Most people laughed and called it impossible." Their confidence stems from a history of achieving big results on modest budgets. "We come from indie film backgrounds and are used to punching well above our weight," Abbott adds. After 80 pitches, the studio finally secured equity funding 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, who later co‑founded Wolf Haus and 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, a production company created 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 experimentation with Unreal Engine.
"Unreal was free to download, and I’d always loved games," he explains. "It felt like there was a huge barrier to creating something yourself, so I started learning from YouTube tutorials and built a few small prototypes." Despite lacking formal training, Dietsch eventually conceived a doomsday‑cult simulator that blended survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics—an idea that married his two passions into a single intellectual property. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, expecting to hit technical roadblocks quickly.
When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter recognized its potential and presented it to Dooma, a partner that helped move the project forward. Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, began his career as a film producer and screenwriter before transitioning to games in the early 2000s, contributing writing to titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. In the 2010s he founded several tech ventures, including the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which later sold for C$430 million (about $330 million USD). After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire.
Yet a sudden call from his old Hollywood Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back into the industry. "I was looking at the video Joe had made, and it blew my mind," Wendschuh says, prompting him to leave retirement and join the effort.
He recruited former Warner Bros. Games VP Reid Schneider as a strategic advisor, and Schneider brought in Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, to serve as chief technology officer. With the core team in place, the next hurdle was financing.
Pitching began in the summer of 2023, a period marked by a broader industry downturn. "People liked what we were showing, but the market was tough," Dietsch notes.
The studio eventually partnered with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) for representation, returned to pitching in 2024, and secured a seed round from Lifelike Capital and Krafton. Wendschuh credits CAA’s connections—particularly to titles like 007: First Light—and the presence of veterans like Schneider and Chartrand for the successful raise.
Despite the high‑profile backers, Wolf Haus has remained a lean operation, employing only 13 full‑time staff members. The studio’s philosophy emphasizes a small‑team culture where every employee has a voice and can directly influence creative decisions. To make such an ambitious open‑world title feasible with a tiny crew, the team invested heavily in custom tooling early in development. "Every system must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," Dietsch explains.
"We built a toolkit that lets us expand features across a massive map without the project collapsing under its own weight." The first year of development was therefore split between ideating gameplay and constructing the internal tools that would later enable rapid iteration. The funding model also gave Wolf Haus the runway to perfect these tools. Krafton and Lifelike’s equity investment has been used to self‑fund the game, with only a modest amount of project finance earmarked for marketing.
"Equity partners want the studio to increase its enterprise value, so they support our tool‑building ethos," says Wendschuh. "Whenever we encounter a problem we don’t know how to solve, we build a tool for it. It may slow development, but it lets us achieve AAA‑level results with a small team." In an industry where generative AI is often touted as a shortcut for small studios, Wolf Haus deliberately avoids it for creative work. "We believe a human touch is essential," Dietsch states.
"Using AI to generate content would defeat the purpose of why we love making games." Wendschuh adds that the studio’s AI subscriptions are limited to administrative tasks like calendar management and email drafting, not to any aspect of design, art, or narrative. Interestingly, Krafton—despite branding itself as an "AI‑first" company—insisted that Wolf Haus not employ generative AI in the creative pipeline, mirroring a similar stance taken by Krafton‑owned Neon Giant. The commitment to handcrafted content extends to the game’s world and audio. The six‑kilometre‑square map in Join Us is entirely hand‑built, and the 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors, a decision the team felt was crucial even for an indie title.
"We wanted to preserve the authenticity of performance and avoid the risk of AI replacing voice talent," Wendschuh explains. Dietsch also reflects on the differences between film and game production. In cinema, an idea can take years to materialize, requiring countless approvals and the involvement of high‑profile talent before it ever reaches a set.
By contrast, a game concept can be prototyped in a single morning, allowing immediate feedback and iteration. "You can take an idea, drop it into the engine, and see it instantly," he says, describing the exhilaration of real‑time creation.
Wendschuh notes that film projects are often front‑loaded with intense, high‑stakes production phases that depend on securing a few marquee names to green‑light a project. While anyone can technically shoot a movie with a backyard camera, the odds of achieving commercial success without established stars or distribution channels are slim. Games, however, have far fewer gatekeepers; a small team can release a polished product directly to players without needing A‑list actors or directors. Both mediums, though, share a core creative impulse: storytelling and experience design.
"When I was six, I wanted to make either games or movies," Dietsch recalls. "It came down to a coin toss and whether I got a camera for Christmas. I learned to program on a TI‑83, so I’ve always loved both.
Ultimately, whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re trying to engage an audience, tell a story, and give them an experience. That goal doesn’t change between the two formats."