The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous co‑op cult simulator where robed followers ride pigs, fire machine guns, and eventually confront massive, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. One detail that didn’t make the final cut was the infamous "snake gun," a weapon that originated from a spontaneous suggestion by a team member’s son.
Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, recounted the moment: “The kid asked, ‘Can there be a snake gun?’ We had a modular weapon system, so within half an hour I built a gun that actually launched snakes. It blew his mind, and we kept it in the game.” That anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit of Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival experience where players can recruit followers—or other players in co‑op mode—to build a 1970s‑style cult.
It also illustrates 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 workforce. Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed up their philosophy: “We wanted to be disruptors.
We told everyone we could do the work of a hundred with just twelve people. Most people thought we were crazy.” The team’s confidence stems from a history of achieving big results on modest budgets. Many of the founders come from indie‑film backgrounds and are accustomed to “punching above their weight.” After 80 pitches, they finally secured equity financing from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took stakes in Wolf Haus. 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 his transition to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s experimentation with Unreal Engine.
“I discovered that Unreal Engine was free to download, and I’d always loved games but felt there was a huge barrier to actually creating something,” he explained. He taught himself the engine through YouTube tutorials, built a few small prototypes, and eventually settled on the concept of a doomsday cult simulator—a hybrid of survival mechanics and grindhouse cinema that merged his passions for movies and games into a single intellectual property. The proof‑of‑concept demo was rough but promising. Dietsch showed it to Abbott, who then presented it to Dooma, a production partner.
Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, had begun his career as a film producer and screenwriter 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 C$430 million. After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire.
Yet a call from his old Hollywood‑hillroommate Michael Abbott changed his plans. “Joe’s demo blew my mind and pulled me out of retirement,” Wendschuh said.
He brought the project to Reid Schneider, former VP at Warner Bros. Games and now head of Raccoon Logic, who became a strategic advisor and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as chief technology officer. With a core team taking shape, the next hurdle was financing.
The team began pitching in the summer of 2023, a period marked by a broader industry downturn. “People liked what we were building but the market was tough,” Dietsch recalled. The studio eventually partnered with CAA in Los Angeles, which helped secure a seed round from Lifelike Capital and Krafton in 2024. Wendschuh noted that CAA’s representation—also handling titles like 007: First Light—combined with veteran advisors gave the studio credibility during a skeptical funding climate.
Despite the high‑profile backing, Wolf Haus kept its staff lean: only 13 full‑time employees at the time of writing. The studio’s approach was to give every team member a voice and a direct impact on the creative direction. “We wanted a small‑team atmosphere where everyone touches the creative and feels ownership,” Dietsch said. To make such an ambitious open‑world game feasible with a tiny crew, Wolf Haus invested heavily in custom tooling early on.
“If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single person,” Dietsch explained. The first year of development was split between ideating gameplay and building the internal toolset that would allow those ideas to scale across a six‑kilometre‑square map without collapsing under their own weight. This tool‑centric philosophy also aligned with the expectations of their equity investors, who encouraged the studio to develop reusable pipelines rather than rely on shortcuts. Funding from Krafton and Lifelike was structured as equity, meaning the studio could self‑finance development while using a modest amount of project finance for marketing.
“Our investors want the studio to increase enterprise value, so they support us in building extensive tools,” Wendschuh said. “Whenever we encounter a problem we don’t know how to solve, we build a tool for it. It may slow us down in the short term, but it enables us to deliver a AAA‑level experience with a small team.” In an industry increasingly obsessed with generative AI, Wolf Haus deliberately avoided using such technology in the creative process. “We don’t use generative AI for game creation,” Dietsch affirmed.
“The human touch is essential to why we get up in the morning.” Wendschuh added that the studio only employs AI for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting. Krafton, despite branding itself as an “AI‑first” company, also insisted that Wolf Haus refrain from using generative AI for core development, mirroring similar statements from other Krafton‑owned studios such as Neon Giant.
The commitment to handcrafted content extends to the game’s world and voice work. The entire six‑kilometre‑square map is manually designed, and the 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors—not AI‑generated voices. “That was non‑negotiable for us, even as a small indie,” Dietsch emphasized. Dietsch finds the immediacy of game development liberating compared with film.
In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring studio approval, casting, and a long production schedule. In contrast, a concept can be prototyped in a few hours within a game engine, allowing instant iteration.
Wendschuh noted that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with extensive pre‑production effort to secure high‑profile talent before a studio greenlights a project. While anyone can shoot a backyard movie, breaking through without star power or distribution is rare. By comparison, the barriers to publishing a successful game are lower; “You don’t need an A‑list actor or director to make a hit game,” Dietsch observed. Both mediums, however, share a core creative impulse: storytelling and delivering an experience.
“When I was six, I wanted to make games or movies, and it came down to a coin toss and a Christmas camera,” he recalled. “Whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re trying to give someone an experience, tell a story, and engage them.
The tools change, but the goal stays the same.” Join Us thus stands as a testament to what a tightly knit, technically adept team can achieve when they blend Hollywood storytelling sensibilities with indie‑game ingenuity, all while refusing to lean on generative AI shortcuts. The result is a richly detailed, hand‑crafted cult simulator that promises players a uniquely chaotic and immersive experience, built by a dozen passionate creators who chose to scale their vision through craftsmanship rather than numbers.