The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulation. In the clip, robed followers charge on pig‑back while firing machine guns, culminating in a shot of massive, Cthulhu‑like tentacles.
What didn’t make the final cut was the infamous "snake gun," a weapon that originated from a simple suggestion by a team member’s child. As Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, explains, "One of our team member's sons asked, 'Can there be a snake gun?' With our rapid‑prototyping tools we built one in about thirty minutes.
It blew his mind, and it stayed in the game." That anecdote captures the chaotic, experimental spirit of Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival title where players can recruit followers—or invite friends in co‑op—to join a 1970s‑style cult. The game’s design philosophy mirrors the studio’s broader approach: lean, tool‑centric, and deliberately disruptive. Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed it up: "We set out to prove you don’t need a hundred‑person studio to build a high‑fidelity experience. Twelve developers?
Impossible, they said. We showed them otherwise." The team’s confidence stems from a history of punching far above their weight. Many of the founders cut their teeth on independent film projects, learning to stretch modest budgets into cinematic results. Their perseverance paid off after 80 pitches, eventually securing equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital.
Both investors took a stake in Wolf Haus, providing the capital needed to turn the cult simulator from concept to reality. Wolf Haus’s leadership team is steeped in Hollywood pedigree.
Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of actor‑director Mel Gibson, and the two later co‑wrote and co‑directed the indie features Happy Hunting and Manifest West. Abbott is the son of renowned 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 film résumé also includes producing credits on titles such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx.
The seed of Join Us was planted when Dietsch began tinkering with Unreal Engine. "Unreal was free to download, and I’d always loved games, but the barrier to creating something felt huge," he recalls. He taught himself through YouTube tutorials, eventually producing a few small prototypes.
Yet the idea that persisted was a doomsday cult simulator—a hybrid of survival mechanics and grindhouse cinema that could merge his love of movies and games into a single intellectual property. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, expecting to hit a technical wall soon. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter recognized its potential and introduced it to Dooma, the production arm that would later become part of Wolf Haus.
Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, had a varied career that spanned film production, screenwriting, and video‑game narrative work. He contributed writing to Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins before founding several tech ventures, including the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million.
After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire. Yet a chance call from his old Hollywood Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back into development.
"I watched the demo Joe sent me and it blew my mind," Wendschuh says, prompting him to re‑enter the industry. He brought on Reid Schneider, a former Warner Bros.
Games VP, as a strategic advisor, and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, formerly of Ubisoft Montreal, as chief technology officer. With the core team assembled, the next hurdle was financing during a market downturn. The studio began pitching in summer 2023, initially struggling to find backers. After partnering with CAA in Los Angeles and re‑pitching in 2024, they finally closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton.
Wendschuh credits CAA’s representation—also handling titles like 007: First Light—and the presence of veteran advisors for smoothing the path. Despite the high ambitions, Wolf Haus remains a 13‑person studio. Dietsch emphasizes that a small, tightly knit team allows every member to influence the creative direction.
To make a large, open‑world game feasible with such a headcount, the studio invested heavily in internal tooling from day one. "Every system must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," he explains.
"We built a toolkit that lets us expand features across a massive map without the project collapsing under its own weight. The first year was as much about building those tools as it was about designing the game itself." The equity funding model gave Wolf Haus the runway to perfect these tools.
Krafton and Lifelike’s capital funded the entire development, with only a modest amount of project finance earmarked for marketing. This structure aligns investor incentives with the studio’s long‑term value creation, encouraging the continued development of reusable tools. When asked about generative AI, Dietsch is unequivocal: the studio does not employ it for creative work.
"We believe a human touch is essential. Using AI to generate assets would defeat the purpose of why we love making games," he says. Wendschuh adds that while they may use AI for administrative tasks like calendar management, it never touches the artistic side. Interestingly, Krafton—publicly branding itself as an "AI‑first" company—specifically required Wolf Haus to avoid generative AI in the game's creation, mirroring similar stances taken by other Krafton‑owned studios.
The commitment to handcrafted content extends to the game’s world and audio. The six‑kilometer‑square map of Join Us is entirely hand‑built, and the 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors, not synthetic voices. This dedication reflects the team’s belief that authenticity matters, even for an indie title. Dietsch notes a key advantage of game development over film: immediacy.
In cinema, an idea can take years to materialize, requiring approvals, casting, and studio greenlights. In contrast, a game concept can be prototyped within hours, allowing creators to see and iterate on their vision instantly. Wendschuh observes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, often dependent on securing a handful of high‑profile talent to obtain financing, whereas games face fewer gatekeepers.
"You don’t need an A‑list actor or director to make a successful game," he says. Both mediums, however, share a common creative drive: storytelling and delivering an experience.
Dietsch reflects on his childhood, recalling that whether he received a camera or a programming calculator for Christmas, the core desire to craft narratives remained unchanged. Today, that desire manifests in Join Us—a cult‑themed, chaotic sandbox that blends horror, humor, and survival, built by a tiny Hollywood‑rooted team that chose tools and human talent over shortcuts like generative AI.