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 teaser, robed followers zip around on pigs, wielding machine guns, before the screen cuts to a massive, Cthulhu‑like mass of tentacles. One element that didn’t make the final cut was the infamous snake‑gun, a quirky weapon that Joe Dietsch, the studio’s CEO and creative director, says was born from a child’s imagination.
"My teammate’s son asked, ‘What would a snake‑gun look like?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that let us spin up a new firearm in about thirty minutes, so I built one that actually fires snakes. He was thrilled, and the weapon stayed in the game," Dietsch recalls. That anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival game where players can recruit AI followers or friends to join a 1970s‑style cult.
It also illustrates why Wolf Haus relies heavily on in‑house technology to achieve high‑fidelity results with a remarkably small staff. Michael Abbott, the studio’s chief operating officer, summed up their philosophy: "We wanted to be disruptors.
Everyone told us a twelve‑person team couldn’t build a game of this scope. We proved them wrong." Their confidence stems from a history of punching far above their budgetary weight in the indie‑film world. After eighty pitches, the team 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 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 originally founded by Chris Roberts before his transition 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. "I discovered that Unreal was free to download and started tinkering with it after watching countless YouTube tutorials," he says. Though he had never built a game before, he managed a few small prototypes before deciding to tackle something bigger: a doomsday cult simulator that merged his love of survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, showed it to Abbott, and Abbott introduced the project to Dooma, a partner that helped shape the vision.
Dooma Wendschuh, Wolf Haus’s chief financial officer 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 services 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 roughly C$430 million (US$330 million). After the sale, he bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire. Yet a chance call from his old Hollywood‑Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back into development. "When I saw the demo Joe had built, it blew my mind and convinced me to come out of retirement," Wendschuh says.
The revived team added industry veterans as advisors: Reid Schneider, former vice‑president at Warner Bros. Games and now head of Raccoon Logic (the studio behind Journey to the Savage Planet), and Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer who became chief technology officer. With this talent pool assembled, the next hurdle was financing, which proved difficult amid a broader industry downturn.
After initial outreach, the studio signed with CAA in Los Angeles, refined their pitch, and eventually closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton in 2024. Abbott notes that CAA’s representation—also handling titles like 007: First Light—opened doors, while Schneider and Chartrand’s game‑development experience lent credibility. "Our agent Derek Douglas had represented me for twelve years and previously ran the video‑game department at William Morris," Wendschuh adds.
What truly sets Join Us apart is the way it is being built: a full‑scale, high‑quality open world created by just thirteen full‑time staff members. Dietsch explains that the team deliberately kept the roster small to ensure every voice could influence the creative direction. To make such an ambitious project feasible, they invested heavily in custom tooling from day one.
"If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," Dietsch says. "We built a toolkit that lets us expand features across a massive map without the project collapsing under its own weight." The funding structure also gave the studio breathing room to perfect these tools. Krafton and Lifelike’s equity investments were used to self‑fund development, with only a modest amount of project finance earmarked for marketing.
"Equity partners care about the studio’s enterprise value, so they encourage us to build robust tools," Wendschuh explains. "When we encounter a problem we don’t know how to solve, we simply create a tool to address it. It may slow short‑term progress, but it enables a tiny team to deliver a game of this scale." Despite the current hype around generative AI, Wolf Haus deliberately steers clear of it in the creative process.
"We believe a human touch is essential for games. Automating creation would defeat the very reason we get up each morning," Dietsch says. Wendschuh adds that the studio only uses AI for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting, never for art, design, or writing. Krafton, which has branded itself as an "AI‑first" company, actually required assurance that Wolf Haus would not rely on generative AI for core development—a stance echoed by Krafton‑owned Neon Giant.
The team’s commitment to handcrafted content extends to the world itself: the six‑kilometre‑square map is entirely hand‑built, and the game features roughly 15,000 voice lines recorded by human actors. "Even as a small indie, we felt it was crucial to preserve that human element," Dietsch emphasizes.
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 materialize, requiring countless approvals before it ever appears on screen. In game development, however, an idea can be prototyped in a single morning, instantly visualized in the engine, and iterated upon in real time.
Wendschuh observes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with massive coordination needed to secure A‑list talent and studio backing. While anyone can shoot a backyard movie, breaking through without star power or distribution is rare. By contrast, the barriers to entry for games are lower, allowing small teams to reach a global audience without celebrity endorsement. Both mediums, however, share a common creative impulse: the desire to tell a story and deliver an experience.
"When I was six, I wanted to make movies or games; it boiled down to a coin toss and getting a camera for Christmas," Dietsch reflects. "I learned programming on a TI‑83, so the two paths have always felt intertwined. Whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re crafting an experience, telling a story, and engaging an audience.
That core motivation hasn’t changed."