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 confront massive, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. One of the more memorable, though omitted, moments was the appearance of a snake‑shooting weapon. Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, explains that the idea came from a team member’s child who asked, “What would a snake gun look like?” Thanks to a flexible internal tool that lets the team prototype weapons in minutes, Dietsch was able to craft a functioning snake gun in roughly half an hour, and the quirky weapon made it into the final build.
That anecdote encapsulates the chaotic, sandbox‑style gameplay Join Us aims to deliver. Players will explore an open‑world survival environment, recruiting followers—or fellow players in co‑op mode—to build a 1970s‑inspired cult. It also highlights the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has enabled a high‑fidelity experience to be assembled by a surprisingly small team.
Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, says the studio set out to be “disruptors,” insisting that a dozen developers could accomplish what larger studios typically require. "Everyone told us it was impossible," Abbott recalls, "but we’ve spent our careers in indie film, learning to punch far above our weight, so we knew we could make it happen." The path to funding was long and winding. After 80 pitches, Wolf Haus finally secured equity investments from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which now hold stakes in the company.
The founders’ Hollywood pedigree played a role in shaping the studio’s culture. 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 house originally founded by Chris Roberts before his move to the Star Citizen project.
Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84, starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s early experiments in Unreal Engine. "Unreal was free to download, and I’d always loved games, but the barrier to actually creating something felt huge," he says. He taught himself through YouTube tutorials, built a few modest prototypes, and eventually gravitated toward a doomsday cult simulator concept that merged his love of survival games with grindhouse cinema aesthetics.
He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, showed it to Abbott, and the pair began refining the idea, assuming they would eventually hit a technical wall. Instead, the demo sparked further interest and led to a partnership with Dooma.
Dooma Wendschuh, Wolf Haus’s CFO and narrative director, entered the gaming world after a career in film production and screenwriting. In the early 2000s he founded Sekretagent Productions, providing narrative services for titles such as Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins.
Later, he launched several tech ventures, including the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million (US$330 million). After a brief retirement on a remote Canadian island, a call from his old Hollywood‑hill roommate Michael Abbott pulled him back into the industry. Impressed by Dietsch’s demo, Wendschuh helped bring in Reid Schneider—former Warner Bros.
Games VP and current head of Raccoon Logic—and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as chief technology officer. Securing capital proved challenging amid a broader industry downturn. The team began pitching in summer 2023, receiving positive feedback but facing a skeptical market. After engaging CAA (Creative Artists Agency) and re‑pitching in 2024, they finally closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton.
Wendschuh credits the CAA connection, which also represents titles like 007: First Light, and the involvement of seasoned veterans Schneider and Chartrand for opening doors. Despite the high ambitions of Join Us, Wolf Haus operates with just 13 full‑time staff members. Dietsch emphasizes that the small‑team model is intentional: everyone should have a voice, touch the creative process, and feel ownership over the final product.
To make such a scope feasible, the studio invested heavily in internal tooling from day one. "Any system in the game must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," Dietsch notes. The first year of development was split between ideating gameplay and building the underlying tools that would keep the open‑world from collapsing under its own weight.
The equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike allowed Wolf Haus to self‑finance the bulk of development, with only a modest amount of project finance earmarked for marketing. This structure aligns investor incentives with the studio’s long‑term value creation, encouraging the continued development of reusable tools. "When we encounter a problem we don’t know how to solve, we simply build a tool for it," Wendschuh explains. While this approach can slow immediate progress, it empowers a tiny team to produce a game of this magnitude.
When asked about generative AI, both Dietsch and Wendschuh are unequivocal: the studio does not employ AI for creative work. "We believe a human touch is essential to game making," Dietsch says.
The only AI usage is administrative—calendar scheduling and email drafting. Interestingly, Krafton, which has marketed itself as an "AI‑first" company, explicitly required Wolf Haus to avoid generative AI in the creative pipeline as a condition of investment.
This mirrors a similar stance taken by Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio. The commitment to handcrafted content extends to the game’s world and audio. The six‑kilometre‑square map is entirely hand‑built, and all 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors, not synthetic voices. Dietsch stresses that preserving this level of artisanal effort was vital, even for an indie‑scale project.
Dietsch reflects on the differences between filmmaking and game development. Film projects often involve long lead times, with ideas taking years to reach production and requiring the approval of high‑profile talent and studios. In contrast, a game idea can be prototyped in a single morning and instantly visualized in the engine.
This immediacy, he says, is exhilarating. Wendschuh adds that movies are front‑loaded with intensive pre‑production phases, whereas games allow for iterative development and quicker feedback loops.
Both acknowledge that while anyone can shoot a backyard movie, breaking into the film market without star power or distribution is extremely difficult. The gaming landscape, by contrast, has fewer gatekeepers, making it more accessible for small teams to achieve commercial success without A‑list names.
Dietsch’s own childhood fascination with both mediums—programming on a TI‑83 calculator and dreaming of making movies—underscores a shared creative impulse: delivering experiences, telling stories, and engaging audiences, regardless of the platform. In summary, Wolf Haus’s journey demonstrates how a blend of Hollywood experience, strategic funding, and a relentless focus on bespoke tooling can enable a 12‑person studio to produce a large‑scale, high‑quality game without leaning on generative AI. Join Us stands as a testament to the power of small‑team ingenuity, handcrafted design, and the enduring appeal of cult‑themed, cooperative chaos.