The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulation. In the clip, robed followers zip around on pigs while firing machine guns, culminating in a nightmarish vision of colossal, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. What didn’t make the edit was the infamous snake gun – a weapon that, according to Wolf Haus Games’ CEO and creative director Joe Dietsch, was born from a child’s off‑hand suggestion. “One of the developers’ kids asked, ‘What would a snake‑gun look like?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that let us spin up a fully functional gun in about thirty minutes.
The kid went nuts, and the weapon stayed in the final build,” Dietsch recalls. That anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival game where players can recruit AI followers or friends in co‑op mode to build a 1970s‑style cult.
It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has enabled a high‑fidelity, large‑scale experience to emerge from a remarkably small development crew. Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed up their ambition: “We wanted to be disruptors.
Everyone told us you need a hundred‑person team to pull something like this off. We proved them wrong with twelve core developers.” The team’s confidence stems from a background in low‑budget, high‑impact filmmaking. “We come from indie cinema, where you learn to punch far above your weight,” Abbott explains. After 80 pitch meetings, the studio finally secured equity financing 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 now co‑heads Wolf Haus. Together they co‑wrote and co‑directed the indie features Happy Hunting and Manifest West.
Abbott, meanwhile, is the son of veteran makeup artist Larry Abbott and helped launch Ascendant Pictures, the production company originally founded by Chris Roberts before his shift to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced titles such as Fight for ’84, starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s early experiments in Unreal Engine.
“I discovered Unreal was free to download and started tinkering after watching YouTube tutorials,” he says. Though he had never built a game before, he managed to create a few modest prototypes before committing to a larger vision: a doomsday cult simulator that fuses survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, ran it by Abbott, and the duo took the concept to Dooma, the studio that would later become Wolf Haus. Dooma Wendschuh, Wolf Haus’s CFO and narrative director, brings a hybrid film‑gaming pedigree.
He began as a producer and screenwriter in Hollywood, then founded Sekretagent Productions, which supplied narrative work for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. In the 2010s he launched several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million (US$330 million).
After that windfall, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, planning to retire. Yet a sudden call from his old Hollywood Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back into development. “I watched the early demo and it blew my mind.
I couldn’t stay retired,” he says. Wendschuh introduced Reid Schneider—a former Warner Bros. Games VP now heading Raccoon Logic—to the project as a strategic advisor, and Schneider recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as chief technology officer.
With leadership in place, the studio turned to fundraising during a market downturn in 2023. Despite the bleak climate, the team persisted, eventually signing with CAA in Los Angeles and closing a seed round with Krafton and Lifelike Capital in 2024. The partnership with CAA, which also represents titles like 007: First Light, proved pivotal.
“Derek Douglas, our agent at CAA, had represented me for twelve years in the gaming world and previously headed the video‑game department at William Morris,” Wendschuh notes. This industry clout, combined with veteran advisors, helped the tiny studio secure the capital needed to continue development. Today, Wolf Haus operates with just thirteen full‑time staff members. The team deliberately kept the roster lean to preserve a collaborative culture where “everyone has a voice, everyone touches the creative, and the game feels like it was made by a specific group of people,” says Dietsch.
To make a world‑spanning title feasible with such a small crew, the studio invested heavily in custom tooling early on. “If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single person,” Dietsch explains.
The first year of development was split between ideating gameplay and building the internal toolset that would later allow the open‑world map to expand without collapsing under its own weight. Funding from Krafton and Lifelike has been structured as equity, meaning the game has essentially been self‑funded.
“We’ve used the investors’ capital to finance development, and now we’re only tapping a modest amount of project finance for marketing,” Wendschuh says. This model aligns investor incentives with the studio’s ethos of tool‑driven creation: when a technical hurdle appears, the team builds a bespoke solution rather than cutting corners.
In an industry increasingly enamored with generative AI, Wolf Haus has deliberately avoided it in the creative pipeline. “We don’t use generative AI for any artistic work. The human touch is essential to us,” Dietsch affirms.
Wendschuh adds that the studio only employs AI for administrative tasks like calendar management and email drafting. Krafton, despite branding itself as an “AI‑first” company, actually insisted that Wolf Haus refrain from using AI in game creation, fearing it could diminish the studio’s artistic integrity.
This stance mirrors that of Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio that publicly rejected the parent company’s AI pivot. The commitment to handcrafted content is evident throughout Join Us. The six‑kilometre‑square map was manually designed, and the game’s 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors, not synthetic voices. “Even as a tiny indie, we felt it was crucial to keep that human element,” Wendschuh explains.
Dietsch reflects on the contrast between film and game development. In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring approvals, casting, and extensive pre‑production. By contrast, a game concept can be prototyped in a single morning: “You can take an idea, drop it into the engine, see it instantly, and iterate on the spot.
That immediacy is exhilarating.” Wendschuh observes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with massive costs incurred before any footage is shot, often hinging on securing a handful of A‑list talent to green‑light a project. While anyone can technically shoot a backyard movie, breaking through without star power or distribution is rare.
Video games, however, have far fewer gatekeepers; a small team can reach a global audience without needing Hollywood’s marquee names. Both mediums, though, share a core creative impulse: storytelling and immersive experience. “When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games.
It boiled down to a coin toss and a Christmas camera,” Dietsch muses. “Whether you’re crafting a film or a game, you’re delivering a story, an experience, and an emotional connection.
The tools change, but the goal stays the same.”