The buzz surrounding Join Us began when its trailer lit up the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulator. The clip showed robed followers riding swine, firing machine guns, and culminated in a nightmarish tableau of Cthulhu‑like tentacles.
Yet, as Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, points out, the trailer omitted a particularly bizarre weapon: a snake‑shooting gun. According to Dietsch, the idea originated from a junior team member’s child, who asked, “Could there be a snake gun?” Thanks to an in‑house tool that allowed rapid weapon scaling, Dietsch was able to prototype a functional snake‑launcher in roughly thirty minutes. The result was a weapon that still inhabits the final game, exemplifying the kind of off‑the‑wall gameplay Join Us promises.
Join Us is an open‑world sandbox survival title where players can amass followers—or invite friends to co‑op—forming a 1970s‑style cult. The game’s chaotic, improvisational feel mirrors the development philosophy of its creators.
Michael Abbott, the studio’s COO, explains that the team set out to be “disruptors,” deliberately aiming to prove that a high‑fidelity, large‑scale experience could be built by a dozen developers instead of a conventional studio of hundreds. "We kept hearing that a twelve‑person crew could never pull this off," Abbott recalls. "Everyone thought it was impossible. But we come from indie filmmaking, where we learned to punch far above our weight.
After 80 pitches, we finally secured equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took a stake in Wolf Haus." The founders’ Hollywood pedigree runs deep. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson—son of Mel Gibson—and the two later co‑wrote and co‑directed the indie features Happy Hunting and Manifest West. Abbott, meanwhile, is the son of veteran makeup artist Larry Abbott and helped launch Ascendant Pictures, a production company founded by Chris Roberts before his move to the Star Citizen universe. Abbott’s résumé also includes a producer credit on the Jamie Foxx‑led action drama Fight for ’84.
The seed of Join Us sprouted when Dietsch began experimenting with Unreal Engine, attracted by its free availability. "I’d been a gamer my whole life, but creating something from scratch always felt out of reach," he says. "I downloaded Unreal, watched a handful of YouTube tutorials, and started building small prototypes." After a few modest projects, Dietsch returned to the notion of a doomsday cult simulator, a concept that fused his love of survival mechanics with the gritty aesthetic of grind‑house cinema.
He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, assuming it would eventually hit a technical ceiling. When he presented the demo to Abbott, the latter recognized its potential and introduced it to Dooma, a key early partner.
Dooma Wendschuh, the studio’s CFO and narrative director, entered the picture after a varied career that spans screenwriting, producing, and tech entrepreneurship. In the early 2000s he founded Sekretagent Productions, providing narrative services for titles such as Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. Later, he built a cannabis formulation company, Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million (about $330 million USD). Wendschuh eventually retired to a remote Canadian island, thinking he’d leave the creative world behind.
A call from his former Hollywood‑Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, about a video‑game project reignited his interest. After reviewing the demo, Wendschuh was “blown away” and agreed to join the effort. He then brought on strategic advisor Reid Schneider—formerly a VP at Warner Bros Games and now head of Raccoon Logic, the developers of Journey to the Savage Planet—and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, an ex‑Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as chief technology officer. With the core leadership assembled, the next hurdle was financing.
The team began pitching in the summer of 2023, a period marked by a broader industry downturn. Despite the challenging climate, the concept attracted interest, especially after the studio secured representation from Creative Artists Agency (CAA).
Leveraging CAA’s connections—including agents who had previously represented veteran game executives—Wolf Haus eventually closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton. The partnership with Krafton proved pivotal not only for capital but also for philosophical alignment. Krafton, which has publicly positioned itself as an “AI‑first” company, explicitly required that Wolf Haus refrain from using generative AI in the creative pipeline. This restriction reinforced the studio’s commitment to a handcrafted approach.
Today, Join Us is being built by just 13 full‑time staff members. Dietsch emphasizes that the small‑team model is intentional: "We wanted a setting where every voice matters, where everyone can directly shape the creative vision, and where the final product feels like the work of a tight‑knit collective rather than a faceless corporation." To make such an ambitious open‑world possible, the studio invested heavily in custom tool development from the outset. "If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single developer," Dietsch explains. "We built a toolkit that could grow with the project, preventing the whole thing from collapsing under its own weight as features proliferated across the map." The first year of development, therefore, was split between designing gameplay ideas and engineering the underlying tools that would later enable those ideas to be realized.
Funding from Krafton and Lifelike allowed the studio to self‑finance the majority of the development, with a modest amount of project finance earmarked for marketing later on. "Equity partners are incentivized to increase the studio’s enterprise value, so they support our tooling‑heavy ethos," says Wendschuh. "Whenever we encounter a problem we can’t solve, we build a tool to address it. It may slow us down in the short term, but it empowers a tiny team to achieve something normally reserved for far larger studios." When asked about the role of generative AI, both Dietsch and Wendschuh are categorical: the studio does not employ AI for any creative tasks.
"We believe a human touch is essential to game making," Dietsch says. "Using an AI to generate assets would defeat the very reason we get up each morning—to craft experiences ourselves." The only AI usage in the studio concerns administrative functions, such as calendar management and email drafting. Krafton’s insistence on a non‑AI workflow aligns with its broader corporate stance. The Korean publisher, despite its AI‑first branding, made clear it would not fund studios that rely on generative AI for core creative work.
This mirrors a similar position taken by Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio that publicly distanced itself from the parent company’s AI initiatives. The commitment to hand‑crafted content extends to the game’s scale and audio design.
The six‑kilometer‑square map in Join Us is built entirely by hand, and the 15,000 spoken lines were recorded by human voice actors—an effort that the team views as essential to preserving authenticity, even for an indie‑sized project. Dietsch notes that the immediacy of game development is a key attraction compared to his film background. In cinema, a concept can take years to materialize, requiring approvals, scheduling, and massive coordination before a director ever sees the finished product. In contrast, a game idea can be prototyped in a single morning, placed into the engine, and observed instantly, providing a feedback loop that fuels rapid iteration.
Wendschuh adds that filmmaking is heavily front‑loaded, with intense pre‑production phases dominated by securing high‑profile talent and financing. While anyone can technically shoot a low‑budget film, breaking through without marquee names or distribution is exceedingly difficult. By contrast, the video‑game market offers fewer gatekeepers; a compelling interactive experience can reach a global audience without relying on celebrity endorsements.
Both founders agree that, at their core, making movies and making games share a common purpose: delivering an experience, telling a story, and engaging an audience. Dietsch reflects on his childhood, when a coin toss determined whether he would receive a camera for Christmas or a programming calculator. That early exposure to both visual and interactive media set the stage for a career that now bridges the two, proving that the creative impulse can thrive in any medium as long as the passion remains the same.