The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous co‑op cult simulator. In the clip, robed followers charge on pig‑back while firing machine guns, culminating in a shot of colossal, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. What didn’t make the edit, according to Joe Dietsch—CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games—was the infamous snake gun.
"One of the developers’ kids came up with the idea and asked, ‘What if there’s a snake gun?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that let us spin up a new weapon in about thirty minutes, so I built a snake‑shooting gun on the fly. It blew his mind and it stayed in the final build," Dietsch recalls. That anecdote captures the chaotic, over‑the‑top gameplay that Join Us promises: an open‑world sandbox survival experience where players can recruit NPC followers—or friends in co‑op mode—to join a 1970s‑style cult.
It also illustrates the studio’s tech‑first mindset, which has allowed a small team to produce a high‑fidelity title that would normally require a much larger staff. "We set out to be disruptors," says Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer. "We told everyone, ‘We don’t need a hundred‑person studio; twelve talented people can do it.’ Most people laughed, thinking it was impossible." The founders’ background in low‑budget indie filmmaking gave them confidence. "We come from indie film circles and are used to punching well above our weight," Abbott notes.
After 80 pitch meetings, Wolf Haus finally secured equity financing from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took stakes in the company. The founding trio has deep ties to Hollywood.
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, a production outfit founded by Chris Roberts before he moved on to the Star Citizen project. Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84, starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s experiments in Unreal Engine.
"The engine was free to download, and I’d always loved games but felt there was a huge barrier to creating my own," he explains. He taught himself through YouTube tutorials, built a few tiny prototypes, and eventually gravitated toward a doomsday cult simulator concept that merged his love of survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics. He built a proof‑of‑concept, assuming he would eventually hit a technical wall.
When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter took it to Dooma, a partner studio. Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, had begun his career as a film producer and screenwriter before moving into games in the early 2000s, contributing writing to titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. He later founded several tech ventures, including the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million.
After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire. Yet, in classic Hollywood fashion, an unexpected call from his old roommate Michael Abbott pulled him back. "I was looking at a game Joe had made, and it blew my mind. It convinced me to come out of retirement," Wendschuh says.
He then introduced the project to Reid Schneider, a former Warner Bros. Games VP now heading Raccoon Logic, the studio behind Journey to the Savage Planet. Schneider recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as chief technology officer.
With the core team in place, funding became the next hurdle. The studio began pitching 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 recalls.
After initial outreach, Wolf Haus signed with CAA in Los Angeles, re‑approached investors in 2024, and eventually closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton. Wendschuh believes CAA’s representation—alongside agents who had represented titles like 007: First Light—and the presence of seasoned veterans such as Schneider and Chartrand were decisive. "My agent Derek Douglas had been my representative during my twelve years in games and previously headed the video‑game department at William Morris," he notes. Despite the pedigree, Join Us is being built by just 13 full‑time staff members.
"We entered the project with a clear sense of scope and a desire to keep the team intimate, so everyone has a voice and can touch the creative process," says Dietsch. To make an ambitious open‑world game feasible for a tiny crew, the studio invested heavily in custom tooling early on.
"Every system must be scalable and debuggable by a single person. We built a toolkit that lets us expand features across a large map without the project collapsing under its own weight," he explains.
The first year of development was therefore split between ideating gameplay and constructing the underlying tools, a strategy that also prepares the studio for future projects. The funding structure gave Wolf Haus the runway to perfect these tools. "Krafton and Lifelike are equity partners; their capital financed the entire development. We’re now adding a modest amount of project finance for marketing, but the core game was built entirely with their investment," Wendschuh says.
Equity investors, motivated by increasing the studio’s enterprise value, encouraged the tool‑heavy approach. "Whenever we encounter a problem we don’t know how to solve, we build a tool for it. It may slow us down short‑term, but it enables a small team to achieve something that would otherwise be impossible." When asked about the role of generative AI, Dietsch is unequivocal: the studio does not use it for creative work.
"We believe a human touch is essential. Handing the creative process over to an AI would defeat why we get up each morning," he says. Wendschuh adds that the team only uses AI for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting, not for art, design, or writing. Krafton, which has publicly branded itself as an “AI‑first” company, actually required Wolf Haus to avoid generative AI in the creative pipeline.
"They wanted assurance we weren’t relying on AI to make the game," Wendschuh explains, echoing a similar stance taken by Krafton‑owned Neon Giant. Both founders stress that the human element extends to voice work and world building.
The six‑kilometre‑square map of Join Us is handcrafted, and the game’s 15,000 voice lines were recorded by real actors—an effort the team deemed vital even for an indie title. Dietsch finds game development’s immediacy refreshing compared with film.
In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring countless approvals before a single shot is filmed. In games, an idea can be prototyped in a morning, placed in the engine, and instantly visualised. "You can see it, touch it, iterate on it right away—that’s exhilarating," he says.
Wendschuh points out that film production is heavily front‑loaded, often demanding big‑name directors or actors to secure financing. While anyone can technically shoot a movie with a cheap camera, breaking through without star power or distribution is rare.
By contrast, the barriers to entry for games are lower; a small team can reach a wide audience without A‑list talent. Both agree that the core creative impulse is the same across mediums: to craft experiences, tell stories, and engage audiences.
"When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games. It boiled down to a coin toss and whether I got a camera for Christmas.
I learned programming on a TI‑83, so both have always been part of me. Whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re delivering an experience and a narrative, and that doesn’t really change between the two."