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 zip around on pigs while wielding machine guns, and the sequence culminates with a massive, Cthulhu‑inspired tentacle monster looming on the horizon. What the audience didn’t see, according to Joe Dietsch—CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games—was the infamous snake gun.
"One of the team members’ kids asked if we could make a gun that fires snakes," Dietsch recalls. "We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that let us scale weapons in minutes, so within half an hour I built a snake‑shooting gun.
The kid was thrilled, and the weapon stayed in the final build." That anecdote captures the chaotic, over‑the‑top gameplay that Join Us promises: an open‑world sandbox survival experience where players can recruit followers—or invite friends in co‑op—to join a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates Wolf Haus’s technology‑first mindset, which has enabled a small team to produce a high‑fidelity title that would normally require a much larger staff.
"We set out to be disruptors," says Michael Abbott, the studio’s chief operating officer. "We told everyone, ‘We don’t need a hundred people; twelve will do.’ Most people laughed, thinking it impossible." The founders’ background in indie filmmaking gave them confidence in punching well above their weight. "We come from the indie‑film world, where you learn to stretch every dollar," Abbott notes.
After 80 pitches, Wolf Haus finally secured equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took stakes in the studio. The team’s Hollywood connections run deep. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, who 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 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’s early experiments in Unreal Engine.
"Unreal Engine was free to download, and I’d always loved games but felt blocked from actually building one," he explains. He taught himself through YouTube tutorials, creating a few tiny prototypes before committing to a larger vision. The idea of a doomsday cult simulator kept resurfacing because it merged his love of survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema, effectively marrying his film and gaming passions into a single intellectual property.
He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, assuming it would eventually hit a technical wall. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter took it to Dooma, a partner that helped shape the project’s direction.
Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, had previously produced and written for films before moving into games in the early 2000s. He founded Sekretagent Productions, providing narrative services for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. Later, Wendschuh 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, intending to retire and walk his dog on the beach. Yet a call from his old Hollywood‑Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back. "A buddy of mine had made a video game, and I saw the demo. It blew my mind and got me out of retirement," Wendschuh says.
He introduced the project to Reid Schneider, former VP at Warner Bros. Games and now head of Raccoon Logic, the studio behind Journey to the Savage Planet.
Schneider joined as a strategic advisor and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, to serve as chief technology officer. With the core team assembled, the next hurdle was financing. The studio began pitching in the summer of 2023, a period marked by an industry downturn.
"People liked what we were building, but the market was tough," Dietsch admits. After initial outreach, Wolf Haus signed with CAA (Creative Artists Agency) in Los Angeles, refined their pitch, and returned to investors in 2024.
Their persistence paid off when Lifelike Capital and Krafton closed a seed round, providing the capital needed to continue development. Wendschuh believes the CAA connection—alongside veteran advisors like Schneider and Chartrand—was crucial. "Derek Douglas, our agent at CAA, was also my agent when I spent twelve years making games.
He had previously headed the video‑game department at William Morris," Wendschuh notes. Despite the high‑profile backing, Join Us is being built by just 13 full‑time staff members. "We entered the project with a clear sense of scope and a desire to keep the team small, so everyone has a voice and can touch the creative process," says Dietsch.
To make such an ambitious open‑world title feasible with a tiny crew, the studio invested heavily in custom tooling from the outset. "Any system in the game must be scalable and debuggable by a single person. We built a toolkit that lets us expand features across a massive map without the project collapsing under its own weight," he explains. The first year of development was therefore split between ideating gameplay and constructing the underlying tools that would support future projects.
The equity funding model gave Wolf Haus the runway to perfect these tools. "Krafton and Lifelike invested equity, which we used to self‑fund the game. We’re now adding a small amount of project finance for marketing, but the core development was covered by their investment," Wendschuh clarifies.
"Equity partners want the studio to increase its enterprise value, so they encourage us to build robust tools. When we encounter a problem we can’t solve, we simply create a tool to fix it. It may slow us down in the short term, but it enables a small team to deliver a game of this scale." When asked about the role of generative AI, Dietsch is unequivocal: the studio does not use it for creative work.
"We believe a human touch is essential. Turning development over to an AI would defeat the purpose of why we get up every morning," he says.
Wendschuh adds that the only AI they employ is for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting. "We have no AI involvement in any artistic aspect of the game," he confirms.
Krafton, despite branding itself as an "AI‑first" company, explicitly discouraged Wolf Haus from using generative AI in the creative pipeline. This stance mirrors comments from Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio that denied involvement in Krafton’s AI pivot.
Both studios stress the importance of preserving jobs for voice actors, artists, and other creatives. Indeed, every element of Join Us’s six‑kilometre‑square map is handcrafted, and the game’s 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors—a point the team considers non‑negotiable, even for an indie title.
Dietsch reflects on the contrast between filmmaking and game development. In film, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring approvals, casting, and studio green‑lights.
By contrast, a game concept can be prototyped in a single morning, placed into the engine, and instantly visualised. "That immediacy is exhilarating," he says. Wendschuh observes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with intense set‑time and the need to secure high‑profile talent before a studio will commit. While anyone can shoot a backyard movie, the odds of it breaking through without star power or distribution are slim.
Games, however, have far fewer gatekeepers; a small team can reach a global audience without needing A‑list actors or directors. Both Dietsch and Wendschuh agree that the core creative drive is the same across mediums: to craft an experience, tell a story, and engage an audience. "When I was six, I wanted to make either games or movies. It came down to a coin toss and whether I got a camera for Christmas," Dietsch laughs.
"I learned to program on a TI‑83, so I’ve always been torn between the two. Ultimately, whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re delivering an experience and a narrative, and that fundamental goal doesn’t change."