SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin announced Monday that he raised $2.15 million for a new independent video game studio in Seattle.
In a post on the official SparkToro blog, Fishkin wrote that he co-founded Snackbar Studio with Geraldine DeRuiter, his wife and Snackbar’s head writer; game designer Nicolas Kraj; lead programmer Miriam Cabrera; and art director Francesco Mazza.
Snackbar Studio’s debut project, currently under the working title The Snackbar at the End of the World, is a top-down, “chill” action-RPG set in a magical alternate-reality 1960s Italy. Snackbar is building Snackbar in Unity, with plans to self-publish it for PC via Steam in the second half of 2026.
The cash was raised via a funding round that attracted 38 angel investors, including SearchPilot CEO Will Critchlow, UX designer Christine Ryu, and BigBox VR co-founder Gabe Brown. Snackbar’s round deliberately uses the same funding model that fueled SparkToro, which eschews VC money in favor of personal networking. Almost all of the investors in Snackbar are people who Fishkin and DeRuiter know personally, rather than big VC funds.
Fishkin made Snackbar’s pitch deck and incorporation and funding documents open-source, in hopes that other indie game companies can use the same model for their own companies.
The move into game development, according to Fishkin, arose as a result of the COVID lockdown. That winter, while stuck indoors, he and DeRuiter picked up gaming as a hobby. Fishkin became a big fan of the award-winning narrative detective RPG Disco Elysium, as well as a host of other recent indie hits.
“The more we played, the more I studied games like software products: analyzing what worked, why, how, and what made a game great vs. merely good,” Fishkin wrote. “It’s hard to turn the entrepreneur thing off.”
That led to Fishkin falling down a “research rabbit hole” about how to make video games, followed by a “long story of false starts” over the next two years. Finally, Fishkin and DeRuiter put their team together and officially founded the studio in 2023.
“During my investigations into the indie video game market, I found that some genres and tag combinations consistently outperformed what a statistical model suggested would be “average” for game performance,” Fishkin wrote. “Two of those in particular were: cooking and action roguelike.”
“In 2023, a game called Dave the Diver released to massive critical and sales success,” he continued. “It made me even more confident that the genre overlap was a perfect match for the market of gamers we intend to target, and for our passions, interests, and skillsets.”
The result is Snackbar at the End of the World, where you take over your family’s restaurant after your aunt is sent to prison. By day, you hunt and forage in the wilds outside town for new ingredients; by night, you cook food to earn money, spend that money on gear upgrades, and eventually find a way to save your family.
At time of writing, Fishkin does not intend to step away from SparkToro in order to focus on Snackbar.
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