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.
Family ties
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.”
Tools of the trade
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.”
To enable such an ambitious title to be created by a small team, the studio spent a lot of time near the beginning on creating tools. “If there’s a system in the game, the system needs to have the ability to scale and debug with one person, essentially,” explains Dietsch. “We need to have a toolkit that we invest time in, so that when the project starts to scale and these features spread across an open-world map, the project doesn’t collapse under its own weight. So I think an outsized part of the first year of development was simultaneously ideating a game while creating the tools to make that game, and any games that we want to make in the future.”
Wendschuh says the funding model helped to provide the time needed to perfect the tools. “Krafton and Lifelike are equity partners, and the funds that they have invested in the company, we have used to finance the game – so the game is self-funded. We’re getting to the point where we are taking on a bit of project finance just to help with some of the marketing, but the game was entirely developed using funding from them, basically.
“One of the benefits of being equity funded is that our investors are incentivized for the studio to gain enterprise value. And so they support us in doing things like building a lot of tools, which is part of our ethos. Whenever we come across a problem that we don’t know how to solve… we just build a tool that helps the team solve that problem. It probably slows down development, but it allows us to build a game like this with such a small team.”
Whenever companies talk about making games with tiny numbers of people, it tends to set the generative AI alarm bells ringing – but Dietsch says that’s something they’ve avoided.
“The short answer is we don’t use any generative AI. We think that it’s very important to have a human touch on a game. We love making games, and turning the development of the game over to an agent would defeat the purpose of why we like to get up in the morning and do this. So it’s not something that we’ve ever had interest in or really see a lot of value in for what we’re building.”
“The slightly longer answer is, I mean, sure, we have some subscriptions to generative AI, but they’re used for managing our calendars and helping us reply to emails,” adds Wendschuh. “We don’t use them at all on the creative side of making the game.”
Interestingly, Krafton was against Wolf Haus using generative AI in the creative process, despite the Korean firm repositioning itself as an “AI-first company” last year. “As investors in our studio, they wanted to be very sure that they were not investing in a studio that was using generative AI to make the games,” says Wendschuh. This echoes comments from Krafton-owned Neon Giant, which told GamesIndustry.biz last year that it was not involved in Krafton’s generative AI pivot.
“We’re all creatives and we respect the work that creative people do, and really don’t like the fact that generative AI stands to, for example, take away jobs from voice actors or artists,” says Wendschuh. “It’s really not what we’re about.” Dietsch says the six kilometre square map in Join Us is all hand made, and the game’s 15,000 voice lines are all done by human actors. “That was something that was really important to us, even as a tiny indie game.”
Film background
One thing Dietsch has loved about working with games compared with film is the immediacy. With film, he says, “you have an idea, you write it on a piece of paper, and in two years, three years, five years, maybe someone lets you go and film it, and then you’re on set seeing that idea live. But you have to ask for permission to get out the door and see that thing come alive.”
With games, he says, you can have an idea in the morning and then immediately put it into the engine, “and you can see it, and you can put your hands on it, and there was something really exciting about that.”
Wendschuh says films tend to be front-loaded. “On the set it’s really crazy and it’s really intense, but at least in the traditional film business, the Hollywood film industry, there’s a lot that happens before you can get on that set. And usually that involves trying to secure the involvement of a very small number of high profile directors and/or actors in order to get it greenlit by a movie studio.”
Anyone could technically make a movie by renting a camera and filming in their backyard, he says, but the chances of that small movie becoming successful with any big names attached or distribution secured are minimal. By contrast, the chances of making a successful game “are just so much higher,” he says, thanks to the relative lack of gatekeepers. “We don’t need an A-list actor, we don’t need an A-list director.”
He nevertheless sees a common creative impetus behind the two forms, and one that could have taken his career in a very different direction. “When I was six years old, I wanted to make games or movies, and it kind of came down to a coin toss, and probably kitting a camera for Christmas. I learned to program on the TI-83s, so it was something that I’ve always loved. And I think that whether you’re making a movie or making a game, you’re trying to give someone an experience, and tell them a story, and engage them, and I don’t think that necessarily changes in between the two mediums.”