The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulator. In the clip, robed followers charge on pig‑back while firing machine guns, culminating in a shot of enormous, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. What didn’t make the edit, according to Joe Dietsch—CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games—was the infamous snake gun. "One of our team member’s kids came up with the idea of a snake‑shooting weapon," Dietsch recalls.
"We had a modular gun system, so within about thirty minutes I built a prototype that actually fires snakes. The kid was blown away, and the weapon stayed in the final build." That anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit of Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival game where players can recruit followers—or invite friends in co‑op—to join a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first philosophy, which has allowed a small crew to produce a high‑fidelity title that would normally require a much larger staff.
"We set out to be disruptors," says Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer. "We told everyone we could build this with twelve people. Most people thought we were crazy." The team’s confidence stems from a background in indie filmmaking, where they learned to punch far above their budgetary weight.
After roughly eighty pitches, Wolf Haus finally secured equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took stakes in the company. All three founders have deep roots in Hollywood.
Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson and fellow Wolf Haus 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, the production house originally founded by Chris Roberts before his shift to Star Citizen.
Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us originated from Dietsch tinkering in Unreal Engine. "Unreal is free to download, and I’d always loved games, but the barrier to actually creating something felt huge," he explains. He taught himself through YouTube tutorials, built a few small prototypes, and eventually gravitated toward a doomsday‑cult concept that merged his love of survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics.
He built a proof‑of‑concept, expecting to hit a technical wall at some point. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter took it to Dooma, the company 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, providing writing services for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. In the 2010s he founded several tech ventures, including the cannabis‑formulation firm Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million.
After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire. Yet a call from his old Hollywood Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, changed his plans. "He said a friend had made a video game and wanted me to look at it.
The demo blew my mind and pulled me out of retirement," Wendschuh recounts. 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 assembled, the next hurdle was financing—a task made tougher by the industry downturn of 2023‑24. The studio began pitching in the summer of 2023, receiving polite interest but little commitment. After signing with CAA in Los Angeles and re‑pitching in 2024, they finally closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton.
Abbott credits the CAA connection and the presence of veteran advisors for the breakthrough. "Our agent Derek Douglas had represented me for twelve years and previously led the video‑game division at William Morris," Wendschuh notes. Despite the high‑profile backing, Join Us remains a product of a lean operation—just thirteen full‑time staff. "We entered the project knowing its scope and deliberately kept the team small so everyone could have a voice and touch the creative process," says Dietsch.
To make such an ambitious open‑world possible, the studio invested heavily in custom tooling early on. "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 equity funding model gave Wolf Haus the runway to perfect those tools. "Krafton and Lifelike’s investment funds the development directly, so the game is essentially self‑funded," Wendschuh says.
"We’re now adding a small amount of project finance for marketing, but the core development has been covered by our equity partners." Both founders stress that their approach deliberately avoids generative AI. "We believe a game needs a human touch; handing creation over to an AI would defeat why we get up in the morning," Dietsch states. Wendschuh adds that the studio only uses AI for mundane tasks like calendar management, not for any creative work.
Interestingly, Krafton, which has branded itself as an "AI‑first" company, specifically required Wolf Haus to refrain from using generative AI in the game’s production—a stance echoed by other Krafton‑owned studios. The commitment to handcrafted content extends to the game’s world and audio.
The six‑kilometre‑square map is entirely hand‑modeled, and the 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors, not synthetic voices. "Even as a tiny indie, we felt it was crucial to keep the experience authentic," Dietsch asserts. Dietsch also reflects on the differences between filmmaking and game development.
In film, an idea can take years to reach the set, requiring countless approvals and the involvement of high‑profile talent. In contrast, a game concept can be prototyped in a single morning, allowing immediate iteration.
"You can take an idea, drop it into the engine, see it instantly, and start refining it," he says. Wendschuh observes that film production is front‑loaded with intense, high‑stakes set work, whereas games have fewer gatekeepers.
"Anyone can rent a camera and shoot a backyard movie, but without big names or distribution, success is unlikely. In games, the barrier is lower; you don’t need an A‑list actor or director to make a hit," he explains. Both agree that the core creative drive is the same across mediums: delivering an experience, telling a story, and engaging an audience.
"When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games. It boiled down to a coin toss and getting a camera for Christmas. I learned to program on a TI‑83, so I’ve always been split between the two," Dietsch muses.
"Whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re crafting a narrative and an experience for the player or viewer, and that fundamental impulse doesn’t change."