The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous co‑op cult simulator. In the clip, robed followers charge on pigs, wield machine guns, and the scene culminates with massive, Cthulhu‑like tentacles looming on the horizon. 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 the team members’ sons asked, ‘What if there was a snake gun?’" Dietsch recalls. "Because we had a modular weapon system, I was able to prototype a snake‑shooting gun in about thirty minutes.
The kid went nuts, and we kept it in the game." That anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival title where players can recruit AI followers or friends to join a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates why Wolf Haus relies heavily on custom tools rather than a large staff. Michael Abbott, the studio’s chief operating officer, summed up their philosophy: “We wanted to be disruptors. We told everyone we could build a AAA‑quality experience with just twelve people.
Most people thought we were crazy.” The team’s confidence stems from a background in low‑budget, high‑impact filmmaking. “We come from indie cinema and we’re used to punching far above our weight,” Abbott explains.
After 80 pitches, Wolf Haus finally secured equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, giving the studio the financial breathing room to develop their vision. The founders’ Hollywood pedigree runs 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, a production company started 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 from Dietsch’s early experiments in Unreal Engine.
“Unreal was free to download, and I’d been a gamer for as long as I could remember,” he says. “The barrier to actually creating something felt huge, so I started watching YouTube tutorials and tinkering.” Those early forays led to a handful of small prototypes, but the idea that stuck was a doomsday cult simulator that blended 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 immediately took it to Dooma, a partner studio.
Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, had a film background before moving into games in the early 2000s, contributing writing to titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. He later founded several tech ventures, including the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million.
After cashing out, Wendschuh bought a remote restaurant on a tiny Canadian island, intending to retire. Yet a call from his old Hollywood‑hill roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back. "I was looking at the video Joe sent me and it completely blew my mind," Wendschuh says. He then introduced the project to Reid Schneider, former Warner Bros.
Games VP and now head of Raccoon Logic, who became a strategic advisor and recruited Ubisoft Montreal veteran Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand as chief technology officer. With the core team in place, the next hurdle was financing during a market downturn. The studio began pitching in summer 2023, securing representation from CAA in Los Angeles and re‑pitching throughout 2024.
Their persistence paid off when Lifelike Capital and Krafton closed a seed round, providing the capital needed to continue development. The studio’s small size—13 full‑time staff—forces a disciplined approach to tool creation.
"Every system must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," Dietsch explains. "We invest heavily in a toolkit early on so that when features proliferate across the open world, the project doesn’t collapse under its own weight." This emphasis on internal tooling allowed the team to iterate quickly while keeping the roster lean. Funding from Krafton and Lifelike is equity‑based, meaning the game is essentially self‑funded. "Our investors want the studio to increase enterprise value, so they support our tool‑building ethos," says Wendschuh.
"When we encounter a problem we don’t know how to solve, we build a tool for it. It may slow development, but it enables a tiny team to produce a large‑scale experience." Despite the industry’s hype around generative AI, Wolf Haus deliberately avoids it in creative production. "We believe a human touch is essential," Dietsch states. "Using AI to generate core game content would defeat the purpose of why we love making games." Wendschuh adds that the studio only uses AI for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting.
Krafton, which has recently branded itself as an "AI‑first" company, actually discouraged the use of generative AI in Wolf Haus’s creative pipeline, mirroring a similar stance taken by Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio. The team’s commitment to handcrafted content is evident in the six‑kilometre‑square map, which was built entirely by hand, and the 15,000 voice lines recorded by real actors. "Even as a small indie, we felt it was vital to keep that human element," Dietsch notes. Transitioning from film to games gave Dietsch a sense of immediacy he never experienced on a movie set.
In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring approvals, casting, and lengthy production schedules. In game development, an idea can be prototyped in a single morning, inserted into the engine, and instantly visualised. "That instant feedback loop is exhilarating," he says.
Wendschuh observes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with intense pre‑production phases aimed at securing high‑profile talent to green‑light a project. While anyone can technically shoot a backyard movie, breaking through without marquee names is rare. By contrast, the video‑game market has fewer gatekeepers; a small studio can reach a global audience without A‑list actors or directors. Both mediums, however, share a common creative impulse: storytelling and immersive experience.
"When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games—it was a coin toss," Dietsch reflects. "I learned programming on a TI‑83, so I’ve always loved both.
Ultimately, whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re trying to give someone an experience, tell a story, and engage them. That core goal never changes."