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 cultists ride atop pigs 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 team members’ kids suggested a snake‑shooting weapon," Dietsch recalls. "We had a modular gun system, so within about thirty minutes I built a prototype that actually launches snakes.
The kid went nuts, and we kept it in the final build." That anecdote perfectly illustrates the chaotic, over‑the‑top gameplay that Join Us promises: an open‑world sandbox survival experience where players can recruit followers—or invite friends in co‑op—to join a 1970s‑style cult. It also showcases the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has allowed a small group 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 ourselves, ‘We don’t need a hundred developers; twelve can handle everything.’ Everyone else thought we were crazy." The team’s confidence stems from a background in making big things on modest budgets. "Our roots are in indie film," Abbott notes.
"We’re used to punching well above our weight." After 80 pitches, the studio finally secured equity investment from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, giving Wolf Haus the runway to finish the game. The founders’ Hollywood credentials run deep. 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 company founded by Chris Roberts before he turned his attention to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced movies such as Fight for ’84, starring Jamie Foxx.
Join Us was born when Dietsch began tinkering in Unreal Engine. "Unreal is free to download, and I’d always loved games but felt there was a huge barrier to actually creating something," he explains. He taught himself through YouTube tutorials, built a few small prototypes, and eventually settled on a doomsday‑cult simulator that merged his love of survival games with grindhouse cinema aesthetics.
He created a proof‑of‑concept demo, expecting to hit a technical wall at some point. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter immediately took it to Dooma, the company that would later become Wolf Haus. Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, began his career as a film producer and screenwriter before moving into games in the early 2000s, providing writing services for 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 firm Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million. After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, planning to retire and walk his dog on the beach. But a call from his old Hollywood Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, changed those plans. "A friend had made a video game and sent me a demo," Wendschuh says.
"It blew my mind and pulled me out of retirement." Wendschuh 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 came on board as a strategic advisor and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as chief technology officer. With the core team assembled, the next hurdle was financing—especially difficult during the industry downturn of 2023‑24. The studio began pitching in the summer of 2023, receiving positive reactions but facing a tight market.
After initial outreach, they signed with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in Los Angeles, refined their pitch, and returned to investors in 2024. Their persistence paid off when Lifelike Capital and Krafton closed a seed round, providing the capital needed to continue development. Wendschuh credits CAA’s representation, which also handles titles like 007: First Light, and the presence of seasoned veterans such as Schneider and Chartrand for opening doors.
"Derek Douglas, our CAA agent, was my agent when I was making games for twelve years and previously led the video‑game department at William Morris," Wendschuh notes. Despite the high ambitions, Join Us is being built by just 13 full‑time staff members. "We entered the project with a clear sense of scope and wanted to keep a tight‑knit culture where everyone’s voice matters," Dietsch says. To make a large, open‑world game feasible with such a lean crew, the studio invested heavily in custom tooling early on.
"Every system must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," he explains. "We spent the first year simultaneously designing gameplay and building the internal tools that would let us expand the world without the project collapsing under its own weight." The equity‑funding model gave Wolf Haus the breathing room to perfect those tools.
"Krafton and Lifelike’s investment essentially self‑funded the game," Wendschuh states. "We’re now adding a modest amount of project finance for marketing, but the development itself was covered by our equity partners." One of the advantages of equity backing is that investors share the studio’s goal of increasing enterprise value, which aligns with Wolf Haus’s philosophy of building reusable tools. "Whenever we encounter a problem we don’t know how to solve, we build a tool for it," Dietsch says.
"It may slow us down in the short term, but it enables a tiny team to produce a game of this scale." When asked about generative AI—a hot topic in game development—Dietsch is unequivocal: the studio does not use it for creative work. "We believe a human touch is essential. Hand‑crafting the experience is why we get up in the morning," he says.
Wendschuh adds that the only AI they employ are mundane productivity tools for calendar management and email drafting. Neither Krafton nor Wolf Haus sees generative AI as part of the creative pipeline; in fact, Krafton explicitly required that the studio avoid AI‑generated assets, mirroring a similar stance taken by Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio. The team’s commitment to handcrafted content extends to the game’s world and audio. The six‑kilometre‑square map was built by hand, and all 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors—an effort the developers consider vital, even for an indie‑scale project.
Dietsch reflects on the contrast between filmmaking and game development. In film, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring approvals, casting, and studio green‑lights. In games, an inspiration can be prototyped the same day and iterated on immediately within the engine.
"That immediacy is exhilarating," he says. Wendschuh notes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with intense, high‑budget set‑ups and a reliance on a handful of marquee talent to secure financing. While anyone can technically shoot a backyard movie, breaking through without star power or distribution is rare. By contrast, the video‑game market has fewer gatekeepers, making it easier for small teams to achieve commercial success without A‑list names.
Both creators agree that the core drive behind both mediums is storytelling and experience design. "When I was six, I wanted to make either games or movies—it boiled down to a coin toss and getting a camera for Christmas," Dietsch recalls.
"I learned to program on a TI‑83, so I’ve always been fascinated by both. Whether it’s a film or a game, the goal is to engage an audience, tell a story, and create an unforgettable experience."