The co-founders of Wolf Haus on how Hollywood heritage, cannabis millions, and in-house tech came together to build cult simulator Join Us
You might recall the trailer for Join Us being featured in the Xbox Showcase back in June. It depicts a darkly comic co-op cult simulator, with robed cult members riding around on pigs and loosing off machine guns, before ending on an image of Cthulu-like giant tentacles. Not shown was the snake gun, says Joe Dietsch, CEO and creative director of Join Us developer Wolf Haus Games.
"One of our team member's sons had come up with the idea," he recalls. "They said, 'Can there be a snake gun?' And we had a tool to make a gun that can be very quickly scaled, so in half an hour or something, I went in and made a gun that shoots snakes. That was mind-blowing for him. It's still in the game."
The story is indicative of the kind of chaotic gameplay to expect in Join Us, an open-world sandbox survival title in which the player can recruit followers – or co-op players – to their 70s-style cult. It's also indicative of the team's tech-focused approach, which has allowed them to make a big, high-fidelity game with a relatively tiny number of developers. Michael Abbott, COO of Wolf Haus, says that "we wanted to be disruptors".
"We were saying, 'Look, we don't need a hundred people, we could do everything with twelve'. And everybody just said that's impossible, they just wouldn't believe us." Yet the team has had experience of doing big things on small budgets. "We come from indie films, and we're used to really punching above our weight." The team did 80 pitches before finally securing funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took an equity stake in Wolf Haus.
The founding team behind Wolf Haus has deep Hollywood roots. Dietsch studied film at California's Chapman University alongside Mel Gibson's son Louie Gibson – another Wolf Haus co-founder – and the pair co-wrote and co-directed the movies Happy Hunting and Manifest West. Abbott, meanwhile, is the son of Hollywood make-up artist Larry Abbott, and helped to set up Ascendant Pictures – the film production company founded by Chris Roberts before he moved on to Star Citizen. Abbott would later work as a producer on films like Fight for '84, starring Jamie Foxx.
Join Us originated from Dietsch fooling around in Unreal. "It's a very simple beginning, which is that I found that Unreal Engine was free to download," he explains. "I'd loved games for years, I've played games as long as I've watched movies, but it felt like there was this extreme barrier to entry to actually create something in that space. But I picked up Unreal Engine and started exploring what was possible with it, just learning from YouTube tutorials."
Despite having no previous coding experience, Dietsch managed to create a couple of small games, before deciding to try something bigger. "I kept coming back to this idea of a doomsday cult simulator, because it combined a lot of things I like with survival and grindhouse cinema, bridging things I like in movies and games into one IP."
He began work on a proof of concept. "In my mind, it was sort of like, 'I'll take this as far as I can go', and I assumed at some point I would hit the wall – at some point there would be this tech challenge where it's like, 'Okay, that's why I'm not supposed to do this'." He showed the demo to Abbott. "And Michael then took it to Dooma."
Dooma Wendschuh, chief financial officer and narrative director at Wolf Haus, began his career as a producer and a screenwriter in the film industry, but moved into video games in the early 2000s by setting up Sekretagent Productions, which provided writing services for Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin's Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. He went on to found several tech firms in the 2010s, including the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which was later sold for C$430 million ($330 million).
Then he bought a restaurant on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere in Canada, and "figured I was just retired and would go to the beach and walk my dog," he says. But in the best Hollywood tradition, just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in.
"I got a call out of the blue from my old roommate back in the Hollywood Hills, Michael Abbott. And he said, 'A buddy of mine has made a video game'. I get a lot of calls like that. As a courtesy to my old roommate, I took that call and looked at the video game that Joe had made. And it just blew my mind – and got me out of retirement." Wendschuh took the game to Reid Schneider, a former VP at Warner Bros Games and now head of Journey to the Savage Planet maker Raccoon Logic. Schneider joined as a strategic advisor and recruited Pierre-Olivier Chartrand, previously a programmer at Ubisoft Montreal, as chief technology officer.
The team was taking shape; the next step was funding, which proved a lot harder. The team started pitching in the summer of 2023, with the industry downturn in well advanced. "People would always see the game we were building and say, 'Oh, this is cool', but it was a challenging time," says Dietsch. "So we did initial outreach, and then subsequently signed with our agents, CAA [Creative Artists Agency] in Los Angeles, and regrouped with them, and went back out for pitches in 2024. And we eventually secured our seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton."
Wendschuh thinks that the connection with CAA – which also represents titles like 007: First Light – helped a lot, as did the presence of video game veterans like Schneider and Chartrand. "Derek Douglas, who's our agent at CAA, was also my agent when I was making games for 12 years. And he was head of the video game department at William Morris."
Pedigree aside, Join Us also stands out for the way it's being made – with just 13 full-time employees. "We came into the project understanding the scope of what we were trying to build," says Dietsch, but Wolf Haus also wanted to maintain a small team atmosphere, "where everyone has a voice, everyone touches the creative, and you feel like this is a game made by a specific group of people."