The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulator where robed followers zip around on pigs, unleash machine‑gun fire, and ultimately confront a Cthulhu‑like mass of tentacles. One detail that didn’t make the final cut was the infamous snake gun, a quirky weapon that originated from a simple suggestion by a developer’s child.
As Joe Dietsch, CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, recalls, “My team member’s son asked, ‘Can there be a snake gun?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool for weapons, so within half an hour I built a gun that fires snakes. It blew his mind, and it stayed in the game.” That anecdote encapsulates the chaotic, improvisational style that defines Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival experience where players can recruit AI followers or friends to join a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates why Wolf Haus’s development process leans heavily on custom tooling rather than large‑scale staffing.
Michael Abbott, the studio’s chief operating officer, summed up their philosophy: “We wanted to be disruptors. Everyone told us a twelve‑person team couldn’t build a high‑fidelity, large‑scale title, but we knew indie film taught us to punch well above our weight.” The founders’ Hollywood pedigree runs deep. 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, the production company founded by Chris Roberts before his Star Citizen venture.
He later produced movies such as Fight for ’84 with Jamie Foxx. Their cinematic experience gave them a comfort with tight budgets and ambitious storytelling, a mindset they carried into game development.
Join Us began as a personal experiment in Unreal Engine. “Unreal was free to download, and I’d always loved games but felt there was a huge barrier to creating something myself,” Dietsch explains. He taught himself the engine through YouTube tutorials, built a few small prototypes, and eventually settled on a doomsday‑cult simulation that blended survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics.
The proof‑of‑concept was rough but promising, and after showing it to Abbott, the idea was handed off to Dooma, a partner studio that helped flesh out the vision. Key to the project’s momentum was Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, whose career straddles film and games. He started as a producer and screenwriter before founding Sekretagent Productions, which supplied 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 roughly C$430 million. After a brief retirement on a remote Canadian island, a call from his old Hollywood‑hill roommate Michael Abbott pulled him back into development. Wendschuh was instantly impressed by the demo and recruited former Warner Bros.
Games VP Reid Schneider as a strategic advisor, who then brought in Ubisoft Montreal veteran Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand as chief technology officer. Securing financing proved tougher than building the prototype. The team began pitching in the summer of 2023, a period marked by a broader industry downturn.
Initial reactions were positive—“people thought it was cool”—but the market was cautious. After aligning with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and refining their pitch, Wolf Haus closed a seed round with Krafton and Lifelike Capital in 2024. Both investors took equity stakes, allowing the studio to self‑fund development while retaining creative control.
Wolf Haus’s development model hinges on robust internal tools. “If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single person,” says Dietsch. The first year of production was split between ideating gameplay and building the underlying toolset that would keep the open‑world map from collapsing under its own weight. This tooling‑first approach, backed by equity funding that encourages long‑term studio value, lets the team solve problems by creating bespoke utilities rather than outsourcing or relying on generic solutions.
Despite the buzz around generative AI in game creation, Wolf Haus deliberately avoids it for creative work. “We believe a human touch is essential,” Dietsch states. “We use AI only for mundane tasks like calendar management and email replies, never for design, art, or narrative.” Krafton, which markets itself as an “AI‑first” company, actually insisted that Wolf Haus not employ generative AI in the creative pipeline, mirroring 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‑kilometer‑square map is entirely hand‑built, and the 15,000 voice lines are performed by human actors, not synthetic voices. This dedication reflects the studio’s broader philosophy: even a small indie can produce a polished, immersive experience without sacrificing artistry. For Dietsch, the immediacy of game development offers a freedom that film rarely provides.
In cinema, an idea can take years to secure funding, cast A‑list talent, and reach a set. In games, a concept can be sketched in the morning, coded into the engine by afternoon, and instantly visualized. Wendschuh adds that film production is heavily front‑loaded, requiring high‑profile attachments before a studio will greenlight a project, whereas games have far fewer gatekeepers, allowing smaller teams to succeed without marquee names.
Both mediums share a core purpose: delivering an experience, telling a story, and engaging an audience. Dietsch reflects on his childhood fascination with both cameras and computers, noting that whether one is making a movie or a game, the creative impulse remains the same.
Join Us, with its off‑beat humor, cult‑themed chaos, and meticulously crafted world, stands as a testament to what a tight‑knit, tool‑savvy team can achieve when they blend Hollywood storytelling instincts with indie‑game ingenuity.