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, unleash a barrage of machine‑gun fire, and ultimately confront colossal, Cthulhu‑inspired tentacles. While that teaser highlighted the game’s chaotic tone, it omitted one of its most memorable weapons: the snake gun. According to Joe Dietsch, the chief executive officer and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, the idea sprang from a youngster on his team.
"One of our team member’s son asked, ‘What would a snake‑gun look like?’ We had a rapid‑prototype tool that could spin up a new weapon in minutes, so I built a gun that fires snakes in about thirty seconds. The kid was blown away, and the weapon made it into the final build," Dietsch recounts. This anecdote encapsulates the kind of anarchic, improvisational gameplay that Join Us promises—a sprawling, open‑world sandbox where players can recruit followers or team up with friends to run a 1970s‑style cult. The game’s development story is equally unorthodox.
Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, describes the studio’s ambition as a deliberate act of disruption. "We told everyone we could build a AAA‑quality experience with just twelve people. Most people laughed and said it was impossible," he says.
Their confidence stems from a background in low‑budget indie filmmaking, where the team learned to achieve cinematic results with limited resources. After an arduous 80‑pitch marathon, Wolf Haus finally secured equity investment from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, giving the studio the financial runway it needed. Wolf Haus’s leadership is steeped in Hollywood pedigree.
Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of legendary actor 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 transition to the Star Citizen universe.
Abbott’s résumé also includes producing credits on titles such as Fight for ’84, starring Jamie Foxx. The genesis of Join Us can be traced back to Dietsch’s early experiments with Unreal Engine.
"Unreal was free to download, and I’d spent my life playing games and watching movies, but the barrier to actually creating something felt huge," he explains. He taught himself the engine through YouTube tutorials, eventually crafting a handful of modest prototypes.
The concept that stuck with him was a doomsday‑cult simulator that married survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics—a hybrid that could serve as a unique intellectual property bridging his two passions. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, anticipating that technical hurdles would eventually force him to abandon the project. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter recognized its potential and took it to Dooma, the studio that would later become a strategic partner. Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, arrived in the picture after a varied career that spanned film production, screenwriting, and video‑game writing for franchises like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins.
In the 2010s, Wendschuh founded several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million (about $330 million USD). After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh purchased a remote restaurant on a tiny Canadian island, intending to retire and enjoy a quiet life.
That plan was upended when an old Hollywood‑hill roommate, Michael Abbott, called him about a video‑game project. "I watched the demo and it blew my mind, so I came out of retirement," Wendschuh says.
He introduced the game to Reid Schneider, former VP at Warner Bros. Games and now head of Raccoon Logic, who joined as a strategic advisor and recruited former Ubisoft Montreal programmer Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand as chief technology officer. With a core team beginning to coalesce, the next hurdle was funding—particularly challenging during the industry downturn of 2023‑2024. The studio launched a series of pitches, eventually partnering with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to refine their approach.
Their persistence paid off when Lifelike Capital and Krafton provided a seed round that covered development costs and, later, modest marketing financing. Wolf Haus’s small‑team philosophy is reflected in its staffing: only 13 full‑time employees work on Join Us. "We entered the project with a clear understanding of scope and wanted every team member to have a voice in the creative process," Dietsch notes. To make a large‑scale open world feasible for such a lean crew, the studio invested heavily in custom tooling early on.
"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 constructing the internal tools that would keep the project from collapsing under its own weight.
The equity‑funded model gave Wolf Haus the breathing room to perfect those tools. "Krafton and Lifelike’s investment allowed us to self‑fund the game entirely," explains Wendschuh. "We’re now only using a small amount of project finance for marketing, but the core development was covered by our equity partners." This arrangement aligns investor incentives with the studio’s ethos of tool‑driven development: whenever a problem arises, the team builds a bespoke solution, even if it temporarily slows progress.
Despite the industry’s growing fascination with generative AI, Wolf Haus deliberately steers clear of it for creative work. "We believe a game needs a human touch; handing creation over to an AI would defeat why we get up each morning," Dietsch asserts. Wendschuh adds that the studio only uses generative AI for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting, not for art, design, or narrative. Krafton, which has branded itself as an "AI‑first" company, actually required assurance that Wolf Haus would not rely on generative AI for core development, echoing a similar stance taken by Neon Giant, another Krafton‑backed studio.
The commitment to handcrafted content is evident in Join Us’s massive six‑kilometre‑square map, which was built entirely by hand, and its 15,000 voice lines, all recorded by human actors. "Even as a tiny indie, we felt it was crucial to preserve that human element," Dietsch emphasizes. Transitioning from film to games also gave Dietsch a sense of immediacy he missed in cinema.
In film, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring countless approvals and scheduling constraints. In contrast, a game concept can be prototyped within hours, allowing developers to see and iterate on their vision instantly.
Wendschuh observes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with massive logistical challenges before a single scene is shot, whereas games have far fewer gatekeepers. "You don’t need an A‑list star or director to get a game funded; the barriers are lower, which democratizes the medium," he explains. Both mediums, however, share a common creative impulse: storytelling and immersive experience.
Dietsch reflects on his childhood fascination with both cameras and computers, noting that whether you’re crafting a movie or a game, the goal is to engage an audience, tell a story, and deliver an experience that resonates. Join Us stands as a testament to that philosophy—a bold, chaotic cult simulator forged by a small, Hollywood‑savvy team that chose human craftsmanship over AI shortcuts, proving that a dedicated dozen can produce a game of ambitious scale and distinct personality.