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 ride on pigs, unleash a barrage of machine‑gun fire, and the sequence culminates with an ominous image of Cthulhu‑like tentacles looming over the horizon. One element that didn’t make the final cut was the infamous "snake gun," a weapon that originated from a simple suggestion by a developer’s child.
Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, recounts the moment: “My teammate’s son asked, ‘What would a snake‑shooting gun look like?’ We have a rapid‑prototyping tool, so within half an hour I built a gun that fires snakes. He was ecstatic, and the weapon stayed in the game.” That anecdote encapsulates the chaotic, improvisational spirit of Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival game where players can recruit AI followers or friends to join a 1970s‑style cult. It also highlights the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has enabled a small team to produce a high‑fidelity title that would normally require a much larger staff. Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, explains their philosophy: “We set out to be disruptors.
Everyone told us a twelve‑person team couldn’t build a game of this scope, but we proved them wrong.” The founders draw heavily from indie‑film experience, a background that taught them to achieve big results on shoestring budgets. "We come from indie cinema and are used to punching well above our weight," Abbott says.
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 pedigree runs deep. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, and together they 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 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 was free to download, and I’d always loved games but felt the barrier to creation was huge," he explains. He taught himself through YouTube tutorials, built a few small prototypes, and eventually settled on a doomsday‑cult simulator that merged his love of survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics. He created a proof‑of‑concept demo, showed it to Abbott, and the concept quickly gained momentum.
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, most notably the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million (≈$330 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, pulled him back into development. "I watched the demo Joe had built and it blew my mind, so I came out of retirement," he says.
Wendschuh 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 this core in place, the studio turned to fundraising. Pitching began in the summer of 2023, a period marked by a broader industry downturn.
Despite the challenging climate, the team persisted, eventually partnering with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) for representation and closing a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton in 2024. Abbott credits CAA’s network and the presence of veteran industry figures like Schneider and Chartrand for opening doors.
"Our agent Derek Douglas had represented me for twelve years and previously headed the video‑game department at William Morris," Wendschuh notes. What truly sets Join Us apart is the scale of its production relative to its staff size—just thirteen full‑time employees. Dietsch emphasizes that the team deliberately kept the roster small to preserve a collaborative culture where every voice matters and everyone can directly influence the creative direction.
To make such an ambitious project feasible, the studio invested heavily in custom tooling from the outset. "Any system in the game must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," Dietsch explains. "We built a toolkit that lets us expand features across a massive open world 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 funding structure also afforded the team the luxury of time to perfect these tools.
Krafton and Lifelike’s equity investment was used to self‑fund development, with only a modest amount of project finance earmarked for marketing. "Equity partners want the studio to increase its enterprise value, so they encourage us to invest in robust tooling," says Wendschuh. "When we hit a technical roadblock, we simply build a tool to solve it. It may slow short‑term velocity, but it enables a tiny team to deliver a game of this magnitude." In an era where many studios tout generative‑AI pipelines, Wolf Haus deliberately steers clear of AI for creative work.
"We believe a human touch is essential. Using AI to generate core content would defeat the purpose of why we love making games," Dietsch asserts.
Wendschuh adds that the studio only employs generative AI for administrative tasks like calendar management and email drafting, never for art, design, or narrative. Krafton, despite branding itself as an "AI‑first" company, also required Wolf Haus to avoid generative AI in the creative process, echoing similar stances taken by other Krafton‑owned studios such as Neon Giant.
The team’s commitment to handcrafted content extends to the game’s six‑kilometre‑square map, which was built entirely by hand, and its 15,000 voice lines, all recorded by human actors. "That level of artisanal effort mattered to us, even as a small indie," Dietsch says.
Dietsch finds the immediacy of game development far more rewarding than the protracted timelines of film. In cinema, an idea can take years to reach production, whereas in games an concept can be prototyped in a single morning, placed into the engine, and instantly visualized.
Wendschuh observes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, requiring the attachment of high‑profile talent before a studio will green‑light a project, whereas games face far fewer gatekeepers. "You don’t need an A‑list actor or director to make a successful game," he notes. Both mediums, however, share a common creative impulse: storytelling and immersive experience. "When I was six, I wanted to make movies or games—it boiled down to a coin toss and a Christmas camera," Dietsch reflects.
"Whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re delivering an experience, telling a story, and engaging an audience. That core drive hasn’t changed." Join Us therefore stands as a testament to what a tight‑knit, technically adept team can achieve when they blend Hollywood storytelling sensibilities with indie‑game ingenuity, all while rejecting the shortcut of generative AI in favor of pure human craftsmanship.