You may remember the Join Us trailer that debuted during the Xbox Showcase in June. The clip introduced a darkly humorous co‑op cult simulator where cloaked followers zip around on pigs, fire machine guns, and conclude with a shot of colossal, Cthulhu‑like tentacles.
What didn’t make the final cut was the infamous snake gun, a quirky weapon that Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, says was born from a child’s off‑hand suggestion. "One of our team member’s son asked, ‘What would a snake gun look like?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that let us spin up a new firearm in under thirty minutes, so I built a gun that actually shoots snakes. He was blown away, and we kept it 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 doomsday cult.
It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has allowed a tiny 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 ourselves we could pull off a AAA‑level experience with just twelve people. Everyone else thought we were crazy." The team’s confidence stems from a background in indie filmmaking, where they learned to stretch modest budgets into ambitious productions.
After 80 pitches, they finally secured equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took stakes in Wolf Haus. The founders’ Hollywood ties run deep. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, who later co‑founded Wolf Haus and 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 originally created 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 when Dietsch began tinkering with Unreal Engine. "I discovered Unreal was free to download and started learning from YouTube tutorials. I’d loved games for years, but the barrier to actually making one felt huge. So I jumped in and made a few small experiments," he says.
Even without prior development experience, Dietsch managed to ship a couple of bite‑size games before deciding to tackle something bigger. The concept of a doomsday cult simulator kept resurfacing because it fused his love of survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema, merging his two creative passions into a single intellectual property. He built a proof‑of‑concept prototype, expecting to hit a technical wall at some point. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter took it to Dooma, a partner who helped shape the project’s direction.
Dooma Wendschuh, Wolf Haus’s CFO and narrative director, 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 C$430 million (about $330 million USD).
After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, planning a quiet retirement. Yet a call from his old Hollywood‑hill roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back into development when he saw Dietsch’s demo and was instantly fascinated.
Wendschuh then recruited Reid Schneider—formerly a vice‑president at Warner Bros. Games and now head of Raccoon Logic, the studio behind Journey to the Savage Planet—as a strategic advisor.
Schneider brought in Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, to serve as chief technology officer. With the core team assembled, the next hurdle was financing, which proved difficult amid an industry downturn in the summer of 2023.
"People liked what we were building, but the market was tough," Dietsch notes. The studio enlisted CAA (Creative Artists Agency) in Los Angeles, re‑pitched in 2024, and eventually closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton. Wendschuh believes the CAA connection—alongside veteran advisors like Schneider and Chartrand—was pivotal. "My agent Derek Douglas, who represented me during my twelve‑year game‑making career, also heads the video‑game department at William Morris," he says.
Despite the pedigree, Join Us is being crafted by just thirteen full‑time staff members. The studio deliberately kept the team small to ensure every voice mattered and the final product felt like a collective creation rather than a corporate assembly line. To make an expansive open‑world game feasible for a micro‑team, Wolf Haus invested heavily in custom tooling from the outset.
"Any system in the game must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," explains Dietsch. "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 from Krafton and Lifelike allowed the studio to finance tool development without external pressure. "The money they invested finances the entire game, making it essentially self‑funded.
We’re now adding a bit of project finance for marketing, but development has been covered by their equity," says Wendschuh. One of the advantages of equity backing is that investors share the studio’s goal of increasing enterprise value, which aligns with Wolf Haus’s philosophy of building reusable tools. "Whenever we hit a problem we don’t know how to solve, we build a tool to address it. It may slow us down short‑term, but it enables a tiny team to deliver a game of this scope," Wendschuh adds.
When the conversation turns to tiny development teams, generative AI often comes up as a shortcut. Wolf Haus, however, has consciously avoided it.
"We don’t use generative AI for any creative work. The human touch is essential to us. We love making games ourselves; handing that over to an algorithm would defeat the purpose," says Dietsch. Wendschuh concedes the studio uses AI only for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting.
"We have no AI involvement in the artistic side," he confirms. Interestingly, Krafton—publicly branding itself as an ‘AI‑first’ company—insisted that Wolf Haus not employ generative AI in its creative pipeline. This mirrors Krafton‑owned Neon Giant’s earlier statement distancing itself from the AI pivot.
Both Wendschuh and Dietsch stress that the six‑kilometre‑square map in Join Us is handcrafted, and the game’s 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors. "We wanted to preserve that human element, even as an indie studio," Dietsch emphasizes.
Dietsch also notes the immediacy of game development compared with film. In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring approvals, casting, and shooting schedules.
In games, an idea can be prototyped in a single morning, placed into the engine, and instantly visualised. This rapid feedback loop energises him. Wendschuh observes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with intense set‑time and a reliance on securing a few high‑profile talent to green‑light a project.
While anyone can technically shoot a backyard movie, breaking through without star power or distribution is rare. By contrast, the gaming landscape has fewer gatekeepers, making it easier for small teams to achieve success without A‑list names.
Both founders agree that, whether making movies or games, the core drive is the same: to craft an experience, tell a story, and engage an audience. Dietsch reflects, "When I was six, I wanted to create either movies or games. It came down to a coin toss and a Christmas camera.
I learned programming on a TI‑83, so the love for both mediums has always been there. Ultimately, it’s about delivering a narrative and an emotion, regardless of the format."