The buzz around Join Us began when its trailer lit up the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulation. In the clip, robed followers zip around on pig‑drawn carts, wielding machine guns, before the screen eruives into a vision of colossal, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. One detail that didn’t make the final cut was the infamous "snake gun," a weapon that originated from a playful suggestion by a developer’s child. Joe Dietsch, the 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 that let us spin up a new gun in about half an hour, so I built a snake‑shooting weapon on the fly.
He was thrilled, and it stayed in the game.” That anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us. The title 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 game’s design leans heavily on the team’s tech‑first philosophy, allowing a small, twelve‑person studio to aim for high‑fidelity visuals and expansive gameplay. Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed up their mindset: “We set out to be disruptors.
Everyone told us a twelve‑person crew couldn’t produce a AAA‑level title, but we knew from indie filmmaking that a lean team can punch far above its weight.” Wolf Haus’s founders bring a deep Hollywood pedigree to the table. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, who later co‑founded the studio. Together they 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 started by Chris Roberts before his Star Citizen days. Abbott later produced movies such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx.
This cinematic background gave the team a familiarity with tight budgets, rapid pivots, and storytelling that translates well to interactive media. The seed of Join Us was planted when Dietsch began tinkering with Unreal Engine. "Unreal was free to download, and I’d been a gamer forever, but the barrier to actually creating something felt huge," he explains. He taught himself the engine through YouTube tutorials, built a few tiny prototypes, and eventually settled on the concept of a doomsday cult simulator—a mash‑up of survival mechanics, grindhouse cinema aesthetics, and the kind of narrative freedom he loved in movies.
He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, showed it to Abbott, and the two set off on a quest to secure funding. Funding proved to be a marathon.
After roughly eighty pitches, Wolf Haus finally attracted equity investors Krafton and Lifelike Capital, each taking a stake in the studio. The financing came after a difficult market downturn in 2023, and the team leaned on representation from CAA (Creative Artists Agency) to reopen conversations in 2024.
Their pitch deck highlighted not only the game’s unique tone but also the studio’s ability to deliver a large‑scale product with a tiny crew. Key to the studio’s formation was Dooma Wendschuh, a former film producer and screenwriter who transitioned to games in the early 2000s by founding Sekretagent Productions. That boutique provided narrative services for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. Wendschuh later built a series of tech ventures, including the cannabis‑formulation firm Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million (about $330 million USD).
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. He was instantly impressed by Dietsch’s demo and agreed to help, bringing in Reid Schneider—formerly a VP at Warner Bros. Games—and Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a veteran Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as strategic advisors and technical leadership.
With the core team solidified, the next hurdle was building the tools that would let a dozen developers create a sprawling, six‑kilometer‑square world. Dietsch emphasizes that every system in the game needed to be scalable and debuggable by a single person. "We invested heavily in a custom toolkit early on, so that as features proliferated across the open world, the engine wouldn’t buckle under its own weight," he says. This tooling‑first approach consumed much of the first year, as the team simultaneously designed gameplay concepts and built the underlying infrastructure to support them.
The financing model also gave Wolf Haus breathing room to perfect these tools. Krafton and Lifelike’s equity investment meant the studio could self‑fund development, only turning to external project finance later for marketing purposes. "Our investors are motivated to increase the studio’s enterprise value, so they support our tool‑building ethos," notes Wendschuh.
"Whenever we hit a problem we can’t solve, we simply create a new tool. It may slow us down in the short term, but it empowers a tiny team to achieve something that would normally require dozens of engineers." In an industry where generative AI is often touted as a shortcut for small teams, Wolf Haus deliberately steered clear of it for creative work. Dietsch states plainly, "We don’t use generative AI in the game’s creation.
The human touch is essential to us." Wendschuh adds that the studio only employs AI for administrative tasks like calendar management and email drafting. Even Krafton, which has branded itself as an "AI‑first" company, insisted that Wolf Haus avoid AI‑generated assets, fearing it could dilute the artistic integrity of the project. As a result, the six‑kilometer map is hand‑crafted, and the game’s roughly 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors—a point the team proudly highlights.
The shift from film to games also gave Dietsch a sense of immediacy he never experienced on a movie set. In cinema, an idea can take years to materialize, requiring green‑lights, casting, and massive logistics before a director ever sees the final product.
By contrast, a game concept can be prototyped in a morning, dropped into the engine, and iterated on instantly. This rapid feedback loop fuels the studio’s creative energy and aligns with their desire to keep every team member’s voice heard. Wendschuh notes that while film production is front‑loaded with high‑stakes negotiations for A‑list talent and studio approval, game development faces far fewer gatekeepers.
"Anyone can publish a game today without needing a star director or actor," he says. "That democratization is why a small indie can still make a splash, whereas a low‑budget film without big names rarely finds a wide audience." Both mediums, however, share a common purpose: to deliver an experience, tell a story, and engage an audience.
Dietsch reflects, "When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games—it came down to a coin toss and whether I got a camera for Christmas. I learned to program on a TI‑83, so I’ve always been straddling both worlds.
Whether you’re crafting a film or a game, you’re shaping an experience and a narrative for someone else. That core impulse hasn’t changed." Join Us therefore stands as a testament to what a tightly knit, technically savvy team can accomplish without relying on the hype of generative AI. By leveraging Hollywood experience, strategic funding, and a relentless focus on custom tooling, Wolf Haus is poised to deliver a cult‑simulator that feels both grand in scale and intimate in its handcrafted details.