Seaman: a sarcastic talking fish that made Dreamcast owners speak to their TVs

One of Saito's Vivarium teams was building a tropical-fish aquarium simulator. Joking around at lunch, Saito said his version would be crazy: put the camera on the user and let the pet talk — "Who was that woman you brought here yesterday?" Sega, chasing Sony with the new Dreamcast, was actively looking for exactly this kind of impossible-feeling software, and vice president Irimajiri green-lit it after Kenji Eno introduced them.

A virtual pet that talks back: you raise a sarcastic man-faced fish and must speak to it out loud through a microphone, making conversation itself the game's controller.

Vivarium prototyped on Macintosh, then spent a year and a half porting to Dreamcast, which shipped the game bundled with a microphone. The team licensed a 'navigation'-type speech engine from a Belgian firm — it could only match pre-authorised phrases — and papered over that limit with roughly 40,000 prepared answers. Saito voiced the Japanese Seaman himself; Leonard Nimoy narrated the English version. Crucially, when playtesters babbled long sentences into the mic and trapped the creature in a 'Can you say that again?' loop weeks before launch, Saito fixed it with personality, not engineering: Seaman started saying 'You talk too long, I don't understand' and sulking at the back of the tank until players learned to speak slowly and simply.

A Japanese social phenomenon — comedians imitated Seaman on TV and press declared 'games have evolved'. It became the third best-selling Dreamcast game in Japan (399,342 copies by February 2004) and sold over one million across Dreamcast and PS2 versions. Edge gave it its Gameplay Innovation award and the Japan Media Arts Festival an Excellence Award in 1999; GDC named Seaman Original Game Character of the Year in 2002.

Released in Japan on July 29, 1999, Seaman was a virtual pet like nothing before it: a fish with a human face that lived in real time inside the Dreamcast, aged, bred, died if neglected — and talked. Not with text menus, but out loud: the game came bundled with a microphone and the only way to play was to speak to it, answer its questions, put up with its insults. Saito conceived it as a lunchtime joke about a pet that could ask "Who was that woman you brought here yesterday?", then built the game around a poker game of keyword 'cards' pushed back and forth between player and creature.

The engineering reality was humble: a licensed 'navigation' speech engine that could only recognise pre-authorised phrases, masked by roughly 40,000 scripted answers, all written and voiced (in Japanese) by Saito alone. The decisive move came during a playtest weeks before release. Real people talked too long, the creature looped on 'Can you say that again?', testers walked away. Rather than rebuild the engine, Saito made Seaman complain — 'You talk too long' — until players simplified their speech. The fix was behavioural, not technical — and it made the creature what it was.

Japan responded like it was a pop event: comedians impersonated Seaman on variety shows, and the game rode word of mouth to 399,342 copies in Japan — the Dreamcast's third best-selling title there — and over a million units across the Dreamcast and PS2 editions. Edge handed it the Gameplay Innovation award, the Japan Media Arts Festival gave it an Excellence Award, and in the US Sega of America rewrote the script for English with Leonard Nimoy as narrator. Saito later called the brief 'strange and great' — proof the strange idea, taken seriously, is a viable product.

Voice input was the whole point, not a gimmick bolted on: Saito wanted language itself as the filter between gamer and non-gamer, so anyone who could talk could play.

The rudeness was a deliberate rejection of cutesy pet conventions — and it doubled as the mechanism that taught players to speak in short, clear phrases the engine could handle.

Real-time life and death gave the conversation stakes: the creature kept living (and could die) when the console was off, so checking in felt like a duty, not a session.

Sega in the Dreamcast era rewarded creative risk-taking — Irimajiri's backing meant a gross, strange, unmarketable idea got shipped instead of sanded down.

A hardware limit can become the design: instead of hiding a weak speech engine, Saito made the creature rude about its limits — and the rudeness taught players how to talk to a machine.

A PlayStation 2 remake followed in Japan in 2001 (305,632 copies there by 2008), SeaMail — a PC Seaman that read your email — came in 2003, and Seaman 2 arrived on PS2 in 2007. Saito then founded the Seaman Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to build a script-free 'melody language' conversation engine, arguing the original only worked because pre-recorded scripts hid the machine's limits. The game never left cult status overseas, but it keeps being cited as the weird ancestor of every talking-assistant interface — and of the idea that the most natural game controller is your own voice.