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The Hollywood disruptors making a large-scale game with a 12-person team – and no generative AI

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The Hollywood disruptors making a large-scale game with a 12-person team – and no generative AI

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'. " Yet the team has had experience of doing big things on small budgets.


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