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, wield machine guns, and eventually confront massive, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. One element that didn’t make the final cut of the teaser was the infamous snake‑gun, a quirky weapon that Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, says was born from a simple suggestion by a team member’s son.
"His kid asked, ‘What would a snake‑gun look like?’ We had a modular weapon system that let us prototype a new gun in about thirty minutes, so I built one that literally fires snakes. The kid went nuts, and the weapon stuck around in the final game," Dietsch recalls. This anecdote encapsulates the chaotic, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival title where players can recruit AI followers or friends to join a 1970s‑style cult.
It also highlights the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has enabled a high‑fidelity, content‑rich experience to be built by an unusually small team. 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 off something like this, but we believed twelve could do it. It sounded impossible, but our indie‑film background taught us how to punch well above our weight." After roughly eighty pitch meetings, the studio finally secured equity investment from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which now hold stakes in Wolf Haus.
The founders’ ties to Hollywood run deep. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, the 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 his transition to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced movies 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 been a gamer for as long as I’d been a movie‑watcher, but the barrier to actually creating something felt huge. I started learning from YouTube tutorials and built a few tiny prototypes," he explains.
Despite having no formal development background, Dietsch managed to ship a couple of modest games before deciding to tackle something larger. The seed of Join Us was a fascination with a doomsday cult simulator that blended survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics, merging his love for movies and games into a single intellectual property.
He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, assuming it would eventually hit a technical wall. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter took it to Dooma, a partner studio, for further development. Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, had begun his career as a film producer and screenwriter before moving into games in the early 2000s, contributing writing to titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. Later, he founded several tech ventures, including the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million.
After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire and enjoy a quiet life. Yet, in classic Hollywood fashion, a call from his old roommate Michael Abbott pulled him back into the industry.
"I was looking at a video game Joe had made, and it completely blew my mind. That’s what got me out of retirement," Wendschuh says. He introduced the project to Reid Schneider, former VP at Warner Bros.
Games and now head of Raccoon Logic, who became a strategic advisor and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, an ex‑Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as chief technology officer. With the core team assembled, the next hurdle was funding—an especially tough challenge during the industry downturn of 2023‑2024.
The studio began pitching in the summer of 2023, receiving positive feedback on the concept but facing a skeptical market. After partnering with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and re‑pitching in 2024, Wolf Haus finally closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton. Wendschuh notes that CAA’s representation, which also includes titles like 007: First Light, and the presence of seasoned veterans such as Schneider and Chartrand were instrumental in winning investor confidence.
What truly sets Join Us apart is the way it is being built: a 13‑person full‑time team that strives to keep every voice heard and every member involved in the creative process. Dietsch explains that early in development the studio devoted significant resources to building internal tools.
"If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single developer. We invested heavily in a toolkit that lets us expand features across a massive open world without the project collapsing under its own weight." This tooling philosophy not only accelerated current development but also laid the groundwork for future projects. The equity funding model gave Wolf Haus the breathing room to perfect these tools. "Krafton and Lifelike provided capital that we used to self‑fund the game.
We’re now adding a modest amount of project finance for marketing, but the core development has been covered by their equity investment," Wendschuh says. He adds that the investors’ alignment with the studio’s long‑term value creation encourages the continued building of bespoke tools, even if it sometimes slows immediate progress.
When asked about the role of generative AI, Dietsch is unequivocal: the studio does not employ it in any creative capacity. "We believe a human touch is essential. Using AI to generate assets would defeat the purpose of why we love making games," he says.
Wendschuh concedes that the team uses AI only for administrative tasks like calendar management and email drafting, not for art, design, or narrative work. Interestingly, Krafton—publicly positioning itself as an “AI‑first” company—insisted that Wolf Haus refrain from using generative AI in the creative pipeline, echoing similar statements from Krafton‑owned Neon Giant. Both founders stress that preserving human craftsmanship is a core value. The six‑kilometre‑square map in Join Us is hand‑crafted, and all 15,000 voice lines were recorded by real actors, not synthetic voices.
"That level of dedication matters, even for a small indie title," Dietsch notes. Dietsch also reflects on the contrast between filmmaking and game development. In film, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring approvals, casting, and studio backing before a single frame is shot.
In games, an inspiration can be prototyped within hours and tested instantly in the engine, offering a immediacy that he finds exhilarating. Wendschuh adds that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with massive logistical challenges before a single scene is filmed, whereas game development allows creators to bypass many gatekeepers. "You don’t need an A‑list star or director to make a successful game; the barriers are lower," he explains. Ultimately, both mediums share a common purpose: to deliver an experience, tell a story, and engage an audience.
Dietsch’s childhood fascination with both movies and games—learning to program on a TI‑83 calculator and dreaming of a camera for Christmas—has come full circle in Join Us, a project that fuses his cinematic sensibilities with interactive design. The result is a bold, off‑beat cult simulator that proves a small, focused team can produce a large‑scale, high‑quality game without relying on generative AI, while staying true to a handcrafted, human‑centric creative ethos.