The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous co‑op cult simulation. In the clip, robed followers zip around on pigs, unleash a barrage of machine‑gun fire, and the sequence culminates with an image of enormous, Cthulhu‑like tentacles.
What didn’t make the final cut was the infamous snake gun, a feature that Joe Dietsch—CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games—credits to a spontaneous idea from a team member’s child. “His son asked, ‘What would a snake‑shooting gun look like?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool, so within half an hour I built a weapon that fires snakes. He was blown away, and the gun stayed in the game,” Dietsch recalls.
That anecdote captures the chaotic, over‑the‑top gameplay that Join Us promises: an open‑world sandbox where players can recruit followers—or friends in co‑op mode—to build a 1970s‑style cult empire. It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has allowed a small crew to deliver a high‑fidelity title that would normally require a much larger staff.
Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed up their philosophy: “We wanted to be disruptors. Everyone told us a twelve‑person team couldn’t produce a game of this scope, but we proved them wrong.” The team’s confidence stems from a history of achieving big results with modest budgets.
“We come from indie filmmaking, where you constantly punch 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, who now serves as a co‑founder. 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, a production company originally founded by Chris Roberts before he turned his attention to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84, starring Jamie Foxx.
Join Us began as a personal experiment in Unreal Engine. “Unreal was free to download, and I’d always loved games but felt the barrier to creating one was huge,” Dietsch explains. He taught himself the engine through YouTube tutorials, eventually crafting a few small prototypes.
The concept that kept resurfacing was a doomsday cult simulator that blended survival mechanics with grindhouse‑style cinema—a hybrid of his two passions. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, expecting to hit a technical wall at some point. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter recognized its potential and took it to Dooma, the company that would later become a key partner.
Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, had previously worked as a producer and screenwriter before transitioning to games in the early 2000s, contributing writing to titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. He later founded several tech ventures, including the cannabis formulation firm Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million.
Wendschuh retired to a remote Canadian island, only to be pulled back into development when his old Hollywood‑hill roommate Michael Abbott called. “I thought I was done, but Joe’s demo blew my mind and convinced me to come 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, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as chief technology officer. With the core team in place, the next hurdle was financing—a daunting task during the industry downturn of 2023‑24. After initial outreach, Wolf Haus signed with CAA in Los Angeles, re‑engaged agents, and continued pitching throughout 2024.
Their persistence paid off when Lifelike Capital and Krafton closed the seed round, providing the capital needed to keep development on track. The studio’s small size—13 full‑time staff—has been a deliberate choice. “We wanted everyone to have a voice and to touch the creative process,” says Dietsch. To make a large‑scale game feasible with such a lean crew, the team invested heavily in custom tooling from day one.
“Any system in the game must be scalable and debuggable by a single person,” Dietsch notes. The first year of development was split between ideating gameplay and building the internal toolset that would later support the open‑world map, ensuring the project wouldn’t collapse under its own weight. Funding from Krafton and Lifelike has allowed Wolf Haus to self‑finance the entire development, with only a modest amount of project finance earmarked for marketing. Because the investors hold equity, they are motivated to see the studio increase its enterprise value, which aligns with Wolf Haus’s philosophy of building reusable tools for future projects.
“When we encounter a problem we can’t solve, we build a tool for it. It may slow us down short‑term, but it enables us to achieve ambitious goals with a tiny team,” Wendschuh explains.
Despite the buzz around generative AI in game development, Wolf Haus deliberately avoids it for creative work. “We believe a human touch is essential. Using AI to generate core content would defeat why we get up every morning,” Dietsch says. Wendschuh adds that the studio’s AI subscriptions are limited to mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting.
Even Krafton, which recently branded itself as an “AI‑first” company, insisted that Wolf Haus not employ generative AI in the creative pipeline, echoing a similar stance taken by Krafton‑owned Neon Giant. The commitment to handcrafted content extends to the game’s world and voice work. The six‑kilometre‑square map is entirely hand‑crafted, and the 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors—an effort the team considered crucial despite their indie status.
Dietsch reflects on the differences between film and games, praising the immediacy of interactive media. “In film, an idea can take years to materialise, waiting on green‑lights, actors, and studios. In games, you can prototype an idea in a morning, drop it into the engine, and see it instantly. That immediacy is exhilarating.” Wendschuh agrees, noting that film production is heavily front‑loaded with high‑profile talent required to secure financing, whereas games face far fewer gatekeepers.
“You don’t need an A‑list actor or director to launch a successful game,” he says. Both mediums, however, share a common creative impulse: storytelling and delivering an experience. “When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games.
It came down to a coin toss and a camera for Christmas. I learned programming on a TI‑83, and that love never left me.
Whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re trying to tell a story and engage an audience—that core goal never changes."