Rand Fishkin’s Seattle game studio serves up first trailer for ‘The Snackbar at the End of the World’

If the eventual release of “The Snackbar at the End of the World” is a full-on meal for video game fans, news this week of the game’s first trailer should at least suffice as an appetizer.

Seattle-based Snackbar Studio, co-founded by SparkToro founder Rand Fishkin and his wife, writer Geraldine DeRuiter, unveiled its debut title and Steam page on Tuesday. The hand-drawn narrative adventure RPG puts players in the role of a chef trying to save a struggling family restaurant in a magical version of 1960s Italy.

The studio now plans to launch the game late next year, after originally targeting the second half of 2026. Snackbar raised $2.15 million from 38 angel investors two years ago, and the project began four years ago, according to Fishkin. The team includes five co-founders (Fishkin, DeRuiter, game designer Nicolas Kraj, lead programmer Miriam Cabrera and art director Francesco Mazza) plus about 10 contractors.

In the studio’s description on Steam, players forage for ingredients in the “forbidden wilds” outside town, battling explosive tomatoes, chaotic zucchini and vendetta-driven poultry. They then cook dishes back at the restaurant before a tyrannical mayor known as the Sindaco can shut it down. The game mixes combat and stealth with cooking mini-games based on real-world recipes.

The trailer is set to “’O surdato ’nnammurato,” a classic Neapolitan song performed by professional musicians recruited by the studio’s music director. Fishkin said he and DeRuiter both cried the first time they heard it.

Fishkin is best known in Seattle tech circles as co-founder of SEO software company Moz and audience research startup SparkToro, and he more recently launched Alertmouse, a tool for tracking online mentions. DeRuiter, a writer and author, is Snackbar’s head writer.

In a LinkedIn post this week, Fishkin recalled telling DeRuiter during the COVID lockdown that he wanted to fulfill a childhood dream of making a video game. Her reply: “Don’t wait. Do it now. I’ll do it with you.”

In the same post, he said the game’s themes include found family and fighting fascism “even when there’s no hope you’ll win.” He called it a love letter to DeRuiter’s small family village in the mountains outside Naples, to that era of Italy, to video games, and to the many people both of their families have lost in recent years.

Moments like hearing that song come often in the work, Fishkin said, such as when a new feature clicks or a new animation brings DeRuiter’s characters to life. He has always loved art without being good at any form of it. “I may not be able to create art, but I can enable it,” he said. “What a wonderful feeling.”

There have been lows, too. The team spent its initial 18 months on the project with a contract agency that didn’t work out, losing money with nothing to show for it. Fishkin is glad they kept going, “even when it felt financially irresponsible.”

The game is entirely human-made, and Snackbar’s no-AI stance is firm. “Geraldine hates AI with the fury of a thousand suns,” Fishkin said. He once suggested, just once, that she use Google’s AI Mode to find a synonym, and she was mad at him for the rest of a six-hour flight home from Philadelphia. Even if players, the rest of the team and the games media were fine with AI (and they’re not), DeRuiter alone would make it a no-go, he said.

Still ahead are 10 to 12 months of finishing the game’s content, playtesting, bug fixing, marketing and launch prep. Fishkin called it daunting, but said team members have done it many times before, “even though it’s our first rodeo.”

Fishkin is still juggling Snackbar with SparkToro and Alertmouse, and describes his role at the studio as mostly oversight and management. SparkToro is growing again, and Alertmouse recently hit a big milestone in annual renewals with high retention. He and his Alertmouse co-founders are putting more money into the company to fund growth.

Balancing the three roles is a challenge, he said, but only rarely completely overwhelming. “Like this week.”