The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulator. In the teaser, robed followers ride pigs, unleash machine‑gun fire, and the scene culminates with a massive, Cthulhu‑like tentacle.
What the audience didn’t see was the infamous "snake gun," a weapon that originated from an off‑hand suggestion by a team member's child. Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, recounts that his son’s question—"Can there be a snake gun?"—prompted the team to build a rapid‑prototype gun that actually fires snakes within half an hour, using a custom scaling tool. That quirky weapon still appears in the final product.
Join Us is an open‑world sandbox survival experience where players can recruit followers—or invite friends in co‑op mode—to build a 1970s‑style cult. The gameplay’s chaotic, tongue‑in‑cheek tone reflects the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has allowed a tiny group of developers to produce a high‑fidelity title that would normally require a much larger staff. Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed up their ambition: they wanted to be "disruptors" who could accomplish with twelve people what most studios need a hundred to do. Skeptics initially dismissed the claim, but the team’s background in low‑budget indie filmmaking gave them confidence.
They had already delivered big results on shoestring budgets, and after 80 pitches they finally secured equity investment from Krafton and Lifelike Capital. The founders’ Hollywood connections run deep. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of actor Mel Gibson, and the two 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 his shift to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced movies such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. These film‑industry roots helped shape the studio’s narrative sensibility and its willingness to take creative risks. Join Us began as a personal experiment in Unreal Engine.
"I discovered Unreal was free to download and started tinkering after watching YouTube tutorials," Dietsch explains. Though he had no formal game‑dev background, he managed to create a few small prototypes before committing to a larger vision: a doomsday cult simulator that merged survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, showed it to Abbott, and the pair took it to Dooma for further development.
Dooma Wendschuh, Wolf Haus’s CFO and narrative director, entered the gaming world after a career in film production and screenwriting. He founded Sekretagent Productions, providing narrative work for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin's Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. Later, he built several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis‑formulation company Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million.
After a brief retirement on a remote Canadian island, a call from his old Hollywood‑Hills roommate Michael Abbott pulled him back into the industry. Impressed by Dietsch’s demo, Wendschuh recruited former Warner Bros. Games VP Reid Schneider as a strategic advisor and hired former Ubisoft Montreal programmer Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand as chief technology officer. Funding proved challenging amid a market downturn in 2023.
After an initial wave of pitches, the studio enlisted CAA (Creative Artists Agency) to broaden its reach. By 2024, seed financing arrived from Lifelike Capital and Krafton, whose equity stakes gave Wolf Haus the runway to self‑fund development. Wendschuh notes that Krafton’s own shift toward an "AI‑first" identity actually reinforced the studio’s decision to avoid generative AI in creative work; the investors specifically wanted a studio that relied on human craftsmanship.
The entire project is being built by just 13 full‑time staff members. Dietsch emphasizes that the team deliberately kept the roster small to preserve a collaborative atmosphere where everyone can influence design decisions. To make such an ambitious open‑world feasible, the studio invested heavily in internal tooling early on.
"Any system in the game must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," he says. The first year of development was therefore split between ideating gameplay and constructing the pipelines that would support it, a strategy that also prepares the studio for future titles. Funding from Krafton and Lifelike has allowed Wolf Haus to finance the game without external pressure, using the capital mainly for development and a modest amount for marketing.
Because the investors hold equity, they are motivated to see the studio increase its enterprise value, which aligns with Wolf Haus’s philosophy of building robust tools to solve problems in‑house—even if that sometimes slows down production. When asked about generative AI, both Dietsch and Wendschuh are unequivocal: the studio does not employ AI for any creative tasks.
"We believe a human touch is essential to game making," Dietsch states. The only AI they use are mundane productivity tools for calendar management and email drafting. Krafton, despite its public AI ambitions, explicitly required Wolf Haus to stay clear of generative AI in the creative pipeline, mirroring a similar stance taken by Neon Giant, another Krafton‑backed studio.
All assets in Join Us are handcrafted. The six‑kilometre‑square map was built by hand, and the game features roughly 15,000 voice lines recorded by human actors.
Dietsch argues that this level of manual labor is vital, even for an indie project, because it preserves the authenticity and emotional resonance that AI‑generated assets often lack. Dietsch also highlights a key advantage of game development over film: immediacy. In cinema, a concept can take years to materialise, requiring extensive pre‑production, casting, and studio approval.
By contrast, a game idea can be prototyped in a single morning, inserted into the engine, and instantly visualised. Wendschuh adds that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with a small number of high‑profile talent needed to secure financing, whereas games face fewer gatekeepers and can succeed without A‑list names.
Both founders trace their creative spark back to childhood. Dietsch recalls wanting to make either movies or games at age six, a decision that ultimately hinged on whether he received a camera for Christmas. He taught himself programming on a TI‑83 calculator, and his lifelong love of both mediums has shaped his belief that storytelling—whether delivered via film or interactive play—remains the core purpose of his work.
The result is Join Us, a cult‑themed sandbox that blends satire, survival, and a uniquely human production process, all crafted by a Hollywood‑rooted team that refuses to rely on generative AI.