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 clip, robed cultists charge on pig‑back, unleash a barrage of machine‑gun fire, and the sequence culminates in a nightmarish vision of Cthulhu‑like tentacles looming over the horizon.
What the public didn’t see, however, was the infamous “snake gun” – a weapon that shoots actual serpents. According to Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, the idea for that bizarre armament came from a junior team member’s son. “He asked, ‘Can there be a snake gun?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that lets us scale a weapon in minutes, so I built a snake‑shooting gun in about half an hour. He was blown away, and the weapon stayed in the final build,” Dietsch recalls.
That anecdote perfectly illustrates the chaotic, over‑the‑top gameplay that Join Us promises. The title is an open‑world sandbox survival experience where players can recruit followers – or invite friends into co‑op mode – to build a 1970s‑style cult empire. It also showcases the studio’s technology‑first philosophy, which has enabled a high‑fidelity, large‑scale game to be produced by a remarkably small crew.
Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed up their ambition: “We set out to be disruptors. Everyone told us you need a hundred‑person studio to pull this off. We proved them wrong with just twelve core developers.” The founders’ résumé reads like a Hollywood script. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, who later co‑founded Wolf Haus and co‑wrote and co‑directed the indie films Happy Hunting and Manifest West.
Abbott is the son of veteran makeup artist Larry Abbott and helped launch Ascendant Pictures, the production company started by Chris Roberts before his transition to the Star Citizen universe. Abbott later produced movies such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. Their cinematic pedigree gave them a knack for “punching above their weight,” a skill they transferred to game development. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s experimentation with Unreal Engine.
“I discovered Unreal was free to download, and I’d spent my whole life playing games and watching movies. The barrier to actually creating something felt huge, so I started tinkering with YouTube tutorials,” he explains. After crafting a few modest prototypes, Dietsch returned to a long‑standing fascination: a doomsday cult simulator that blended survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics.
He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, hit what he expected to be a technical wall, and presented it to Abbott, who then took the concept to Dooma. Dooma Wendschuh, the studio’s CFO and narrative director, entered the picture after a varied career that spanned film production, screenwriting, and video‑game narrative work. In the early 2000s he founded Sekretagent Productions, providing story services for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins.
Later, he launched several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million (about $330 million USD). After cashing out, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, planning a quiet retirement.
Yet a sudden call from his old Hollywood‑hills roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back into the industry. “I watched the demo Joe had built and it blew my mind.
It convinced me to come out of retirement,” Wendschuh says. With Wendschuh on board, the studio recruited Reid Schneider – a former Warner Bros. Games vice president now heading Raccoon Logic, the creators of Journey to the Savage Planet – as a strategic advisor. Schneider brought in Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, formerly a programmer at Ubisoft Montreal, to serve as chief technology officer.
By summer 2023 the team was ready to pitch, but the industry was already in a downturn. Initial meetings generated enthusiasm for the concept but failed to secure capital. The studio eventually enlisted the representation of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in Los Angeles and resumed pitching in 2024, landing seed funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital after 80 pitches. The partnership with CAA, which also represents titles such as 007: First Light, proved pivotal.
“Our agent Derek Douglas had been my representative during my twelve‑year game‑development career and previously headed the video‑game department at William Morris,” Wendschuh notes. This network, combined with the credibility of veteran advisors like Schneider and Chartrand, helped convince investors to back a project that, on paper, seemed too ambitious for a team of just a dozen people. Wolf Haus’s development pipeline hinges on a heavy investment in custom tools. Dietsch explains, “If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single person.
We spent the first year simultaneously designing gameplay and building the toolset that would let us expand the open‑world without it collapsing under its own weight.” This tooling‑first approach allowed the studio to maintain a tight, collaborative culture where every employee could influence creative decisions, a contrast to the siloed structures of larger studios. Funding from Kraftor and Lifelike was structured as equity, meaning the studio could self‑finance the entire development cycle.
“We’ve used the investors’ capital to fund the game itself. We’re now only seeking a modest amount of project finance for marketing,” says Wendschuh.
This equity model aligns the investors’ interests with the studio’s long‑term value creation, encouraging the continued development of in‑house tools even when they slow immediate progress. When asked about generative AI, the team’s stance is unequivocal: they do not employ it for creative tasks. “Our philosophy is that a game should retain a human touch.
Using AI to generate art or dialogue would undermine why we get up each morning,” Dietsch asserts. Wendschuh adds that the only AI services they use are mundane productivity tools for scheduling and email drafting. Interestingly, Krafton, which has publicly branded itself as an “AI‑first” company, explicitly required Wolf Haus to avoid generative AI in the creative pipeline, echoing similar positions taken by other Krafton‑owned studios such as Neon Giant.
The commitment to handcrafted content is evident throughout Join Us. The six‑kilometre‑square map was manually built, and the game features roughly 15,000 voice lines recorded by human actors – a considerable undertaking for an indie‑scale studio.
Dietsch believes this dedication to artisanal production gives the game a distinctive personality that AI‑generated assets could never replicate. Beyond the technical and financial narratives, Dietsch reflects on the differences between filmmaking and game development.
In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring countless approvals and the involvement of high‑profile talent before it ever sees the light of day. In contrast, a game concept can be prototyped within hours and tested in real time.
“You can have an idea this morning, drop it into the engine, and see it instantly. That immediacy is exhilarating,” he says. Wendschuh points out that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with intense, short‑term bursts of activity on set, whereas games allow for iterative development without the same gatekeeping.
“Anyone can pick up a camera and shoot a backyard movie, but without star power or distribution, the odds of success are slim. With games, the barriers are lower; you don’t need an A‑list actor or director to reach an audience,” he explains.
Both mediums, however, share a core purpose: to tell stories and create experiences. Dietsch’s childhood ambition to make either movies or games boiled down to a coin toss and a Christmas camera. He taught himself programming on a TI‑83 calculator, laying the groundwork for a career that now blends cinematic storytelling with interactive design. “Whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re delivering an experience, telling a story, and engaging the audience.
The tools change, but the creative impulse stays the same.” Join Us stands as a testament to what a small, tightly knit team can achieve when they combine Hollywood‑level narrative ambition, a willingness to build bespoke technology, and a steadfast refusal to let generative AI replace human creativity. The result is a sprawling, quirky cult simulator that promises players a uniquely handcrafted adventure, all crafted by a dozen developers who dared to prove that size isn’t the only determinant of greatness.