You may remember the Join Us trailer that debuted during the Xbox Showcase in June. The clip introduced a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulator, showing robed followers riding pig‑back while firing machine guns, before cutting to a massive, Cthulhu‑like tangle of tentacles.
What the audience didn’t see was the infamous snake gun, a feature that Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, says was born from a child’s imagination. "One of the team members’ sons asked, ‘What would a snake‑shooting gun look like?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that let us scale weapons in minutes, so I spent about half an hour building a gun that launches serpents. The kid went wild, and the weapon stayed in the final build," Dietsch recalls. That anecdote captures the chaotic, sandbox‑style gameplay at the heart of Join Us.
The open‑world survival title lets players recruit followers—or invite friends in co‑op mode—to join a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first philosophy, which has enabled a high‑fidelity experience to be assembled by a remarkably small team.
Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, sums it up: "We set out to be disruptors. We told ourselves, ‘We don’t need a hundred‑person studio; twelve talented people can do this.’ Everyone else thought we were crazy." The team’s confidence stems from a history of doing big things on shoestring budgets. "Our roots are in indie film, where you learn to punch far above your weight," Abbott says.
After 80 pitches, Wolf Haus finally secured equity investment from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, giving the studio the runway it needed. 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 he moved on to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced movies such as Fight for ’84, starring Jamie Foxx.
Join Us originated from Dietsch tinkering in Unreal Engine. "I discovered Unreal was free to download and started learning from YouTube tutorials," he explains. Though he had never built a game before, he managed a few small prototypes before committing to something larger.
The seed of the project was a doomsday‑cult simulator that blended survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics—essentially a mash‑up of his favorite film and game tropes. He built a proof‑of‑concept, expecting to hit a technical wall soon. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter immediately took it to Dooma, the studio that would later become part of Wolf Haus.
Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, began his career as a film producer and screenwriter before moving into games in the early 2000s. 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 launched several tech ventures, including the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million (US$330 million). After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire. Yet, in true Hollywood fashion, a call from his old roommate Michael Abbott pulled him back.
"I was looking at a video game Joe had made, and it completely blew my mind. It convinced me to come out of retirement," Wendschuh says. He then 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 Ubisoft Montreal veteran Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand as chief technology officer. With the core team in place, the next hurdle was financing—an especially tough task during the industry downturn of 2023‑24. The studio pitched relentlessly, eventually partnering with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) for representation.
Their persistence paid off when Lifelike Capital and Krafton led a seed round, providing the cash needed to keep development on track. Wolf Haus’s small‑team model—13 full‑time staff at the time of writing—required a heavy emphasis on tool creation. "Any system we build must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," says Dietsch. The first year of development was split between designing gameplay concepts and engineering the internal toolset that would allow those concepts to scale across a six‑kilometre‑square open world without collapsing under its own weight.
Funding from Kraftor and Lifelike was structured as equity, meaning the studio could self‑finance the game’s core development. "We’re now using a modest amount of project finance for marketing, but the game itself was built entirely with the investors’ equity," explains Wendschuh. This arrangement aligns the investors’ interests with the studio’s long‑term value creation, encouraging the team to keep building robust tools rather than taking shortcuts.
When asked about generative AI, Dietsch is unequivocal: the studio does not employ it for creative work. "We believe a game needs a human touch. Hand‑crafting the experience is why we get up in the morning," he says.
Wendschuh adds that the only AI they use is for administrative tasks like calendar management and email drafting. Interestingly, Krafton—publicly positioning itself as an "AI‑first" company—specifically required that Wolf Haus avoid generative AI in the creative pipeline, mirroring a similar stance taken by Krafton‑owned Neon Giant. The team’s commitment to handcrafted content extends to the world itself. The six‑kilometre‑square map was built manually, and the game features roughly 15,000 voice lines recorded by human actors.
"Even as a tiny indie studio, we felt it was essential to keep the experience fully human," Dietsch notes. Dietsch also reflects on the differences between film and game development. In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring countless approvals and the involvement of high‑profile talent. By contrast, a game concept can be prototyped in a single morning and tested instantly in the engine.
"That immediacy is exhilarating," he says. Wendschuh agrees, observing that film production is heavily front‑loaded, whereas games allow for iterative development without needing an A‑list cast or director to secure financing. Both mediums, however, share a common creative impulse: the desire to tell a story and give an audience an experience. "When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games.
It boiled down to a coin toss and whether I got a camera for Christmas," Dietsch reminisces. "Whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re crafting an experience, delivering a narrative, and engaging people. The tools have changed, but the core purpose remains the same."