Summary
Seaman is a game that lets you talk to a fish that lives in your home. It was designed by Yoot Saito and was released by Sega in 1999. The game was one of the first mainstream games to use voice-recognition technology. It is also one of first games to tie in-game occurrences to a real-time clock.
Seaman's artificial intelligence isn't what we understand AI to be today. It's not a conversation engine: while the responses differ according to the time of day, tank conditions and player interactions, its 12,000 lines of dialogue are all prewritten scenarios. But it was well ahead of the curve, not least in its trawling for as much of your private information as possible.
According to Saito, Seaman directly led to Dreamcast hardware sales to people new to videogames, and the majority of players were apparently women. Its marketing talked in terms of "raising" a Seaman, rather than playing the Seaman game, and ads were placed in women's magazines.
Saito set out and made it. The result is a curiosity that struggled to succeed commercially. But it's one that, love or hate, no one could be indifferent to. As Saito put it in 2019, to his audience of game developers: "Swim against the stream. Do not try to predict the future – just make it"
