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, fire machine guns, and eventually face off against colossal, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. One quirky weapon that didn’t make the final cut of the trailer—a snake‑shooting gun—was actually a spontaneous addition, explains Joe Dietsch, CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games. Dietsch recounts that a team member’s son asked, “What would a snake gun look like?” Thanks to an internal tool that lets the studio prototype weapons in minutes, Dietsch whipped up a functional snake‑gun in roughly half an hour.
The kid was thrilled, and the weapon survived into the final build, illustrating the playful, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us. Join Us is an open‑world sandbox survival title set in a 1970s‑style cult.
Players can recruit AI followers or invite friends into co‑op sessions to expand their bizarre congregation. The game’s chaotic design mirrors the development philosophy of Wolf Haus: a small, tech‑savvy crew leveraging custom tools to produce a high‑fidelity experience without the massive staff typical of AAA projects. Michael Abbott, the studio’s COO, sums it up: “We wanted to be disruptors. We told everyone we could build this with twelve people, and they all thought we were crazy.” The team’s confidence stems from a history of doing big things on shoestring budgets.
Many members came from indie filmmaking, where resourcefulness is a daily requirement. Abbott, whose father is veteran Hollywood makeup artist Larry Abbott, helped launch Ascendant Pictures—Chris Roberts’ production company before his Star Citizen days—and later produced films such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, and together they co‑wrote and co‑directed indie features like Happy Hunting and Manifest West. This blend of cinematic storytelling and lean production sensibilities informs the game’s aesthetic and narrative ambitions.
The seed of Join Us sprouted when Dietsch began experimenting with Unreal Engine, attracted by the fact that the engine could be downloaded for free. “I’d loved games forever, but the barrier to actually creating something felt huge,” he says. He taught himself the basics through YouTube tutorials, built a few tiny prototypes, and eventually settled on the idea of a doomsday cult simulator—a concept that married his love for survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema.
The initial proof‑of‑concept was a rough, self‑made demo that he showed to Abbott, who then introduced it to Dooma, a small studio that helped refine the vision. Key to the studio’s growth was Dooma CFO and narrative director Dooma Wendschuh.
Wendschuh began his career as a producer and screenwriter before transitioning to games in the early 2000s, founding Sekretagent Productions, which supplied writing for titles such as Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. He later built several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million (about $330 million USD). After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire.
A chance call from his old Hollywood Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, about a video‑game project reignited his passion. The demo impressed him so much that he left retirement, brought the project to veteran game executive Reid Schneider (formerly of Warner Bros Games), and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as chief technology officer. Securing financing proved arduous.
The team began pitching in the summer of 2023, a period marked by an industry downturn. Initial meetings generated enthusiasm for the concept but failed to translate into capital.
After partnering with CAA (Creative Artists Agency) and re‑approaching investors in 2024, Wolf Haus closed a seed round with Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both taking equity stakes. Wendschuh believes CAA’s representation—also handling titles like 007: First Light—combined with the credibility of Schneider and Chartrand, helped break the funding barrier. Even after the money arrived, the studio remained deliberately small: thirteen full‑time staff members.
Dietsch emphasizes that a tight roster allows every employee to have a voice and directly influence the creative direction. To make a sprawling open‑world game feasible for such a lean team, Wolf Haus invested heavily in proprietary tooling early in development. “If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single person,” Dietsch explains.
The first year was therefore split between designing gameplay concepts and building the underlying toolchain that would keep the project from collapsing under its own weight as features multiplied across the map. The equity funding model gave the studio the runway to perfect these tools without external pressure to cut corners.
Krafton and Lifelike’s capital financed the entire development, with only a modest amount of project finance earmarked for marketing. Because the investors’ returns depend on the studio’s enterprise value, they encouraged the tool‑centric ethos, accepting that building custom solutions might slow short‑term progress but would enable a high‑quality product from a tiny team. When asked about generative AI, Dietsch is unequivocal: the studio does not employ it for any creative work.
“We believe a human touch is essential. Handing the creative process over to an algorithm would defeat why we get up every morning,” he says.
Wendschuh adds that the only AI tools they use are mundane productivity aids—calendar scheduling and email drafting—not content creation. Interestingly, Krafton, which has publicly branded itself as an “AI‑first” company, explicitly required that Wolf Haus refrain from using generative AI in the game’s production, 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 was built entirely by hand, and the 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors, a point the team stresses as a badge of pride for an indie studio.
Dietsch notes that this hands‑on approach feels more immediate than film, where an idea can take years to materialize on set. In games, an inspiration can be coded and tested within hours, providing a feedback loop that fuels rapid iteration. Wendschuh contrasts the two mediums: film production is front‑loaded with high‑stakes negotiations for star talent and studio approval, whereas games have fewer gatekeepers and can succeed without A‑list names. This democratization, he argues, makes the odds of a small team delivering a hit game considerably higher than those of a small‑budget movie breaking through.
Both Dietsch and Wendschuh agree that the core drive behind movies and games is the same—crafting an experience, telling a story, and engaging an audience. For Dietsch, the path was a literal coin toss in childhood: a camera for Christmas versus a TI‑83 calculator for programming.
That early exposure set the stage for a career that now bridges Hollywood’s narrative flair with the interactive possibilities of modern gaming, culminating in the wildly original cult simulator Join Us.