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 zip around on pigs, unleash machine‑gun fire, and conclude with a nightmarish vision of Cthulhu‑like tentacles. What didn’t make the cut, according to Joe Dietsch—CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games—was the infamous snake gun. "One of the team members’ kids came up with the idea and asked, ‘What if there’s a snake‑shooting gun?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that lets us scale weapons in minutes, so I whipped up a snake‑launcher in about half an hour.
The kid went nuts, and we kept it in the final build," Dietsch recalls. This anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival game where players can recruit NPC followers or friends into a 1970s‑style cult.
It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first philosophy, which has enabled a high‑fidelity experience to be built by a remarkably small crew. Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed up their ambition: "We wanted to be disruptors. Everyone told us a twelve‑person team couldn’t pull off a game of this scope.
We proved them wrong." The team’s confidence stems from a background in low‑budget indie filmmaking, where they learned to “punch above their weight.” After 80 pitches, Wolf Haus finally secured equity financing from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, giving the studio the runway needed to finish the project. 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 is the son of veteran makeup artist Larry Abbott and helped launch Ascendant Pictures, the production company founded by Chris Roberts before his transition to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84, starring Jamie Foxx.
This blend of cinematic know‑how and entrepreneurial grit set the tone for Wolf Haus’s approach to game development. Join Us began as a personal experiment in Unreal Engine. "Unreal is free to download, and I’d always loved games but felt the barrier to creating one was huge," says Dietsch.
He taught himself the engine through YouTube tutorials, eventually building a few small prototypes. The concept that stuck with him was a doomsday cult simulator that fused survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics—a hybrid he felt could become a unique intellectual property. The proof‑of‑concept was rough but promising. Dietsch expected to hit a technical wall quickly, yet when he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter saw potential and presented it to Dooma, a partner studio.
Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, had previously produced and written for major film titles before moving into games in the early 2000s. He founded Sekretagent Productions, contributing writing to 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. 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, changed his plans. "I was looking at the video Joe sent me, and it blew my mind.
I came out of retirement to help," Wendschuh says. He introduced the project to Reid Schneider, former VP at Warner Bros. Games and now head of Raccoon Logic, who became a strategic advisor and recruited former Ubisoft Montreal programmer Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand as chief technology officer. With a core team forming, the next hurdle was financing—an especially tough task during the industry downturn of 2023‑24.
The studio pitched repeatedly, eventually enlisting Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to represent them. Their persistence paid off when Lifelike Capital and Krafton provided a seed round, allowing Wolf Haus to stay self‑funded for development while using a separate project‑finance line for marketing. Wolf Haus’s development philosophy hinges on building robust, scalable tools that a single developer can maintain.
"If a system exists, it must be debug‑gable and expandable by one person," explains Dietsch. The first year was split between ideating gameplay and constructing the internal toolset that would keep the open‑world map from collapsing under its own weight. This tooling‑centric approach also aligns with the investors’ expectations; both Krafton and Lifelike encourage the studio to invest in proprietary pipelines because they increase the studio’s enterprise value. Despite the buzz around generative AI in game creation, Wolf Haus deliberately avoids it 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," says Dietsch.
Wendschuh adds that the team only uses AI for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting. Krafton, which has branded itself as an "AI‑first" company, actually required Wolf Haus to confirm that no generative AI would be employed in the game's artistic pipeline—a stance echoed by other Krafton‑owned studios such as Neon Giant.
The commitment to handcrafted content is evident: the six‑kilometre‑square map is entirely hand‑built, and the 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors, not synthetic voices. This decision reflects the studio’s respect for creative labor and its desire to avoid displacing voice talent or artists. Dietsch notes a key advantage of games over film: immediacy.
In cinema, an idea can take years to green‑light, secure A‑list talent, and reach production. In game development, an idea can be prototyped in a morning, inserted into the engine, and instantly visualized. "You can see it, you can touch it, and that instant feedback is exhilarating," he says. Wendschuh agrees, observing that film projects are front‑loaded with high‑stakes negotiations for a few marquee names, whereas games have far fewer gatekeepers, making it easier for small teams to achieve success without celebrity endorsement.
Both mediums, however, share a common creative impulse: storytelling and delivering an experience. Dietsch reflects, "When I was six, I wanted to make movies or games. It boiled down to a coin toss and maybe getting a camera for Christmas. I learned to program on a TI‑83, so I’ve always loved both.
Whether it’s a film or a game, you’re trying to engage an audience and tell a story, and that core goal never changes."