Oddities: Seaman

Welcome to Oddities, a weekly feature in which we plunge head-first into the bargain bin of gaming history to extract a single game that you’ve either never heard of, or probably wished you hadn’t. This series follows some of the strangest, most obscure and most incredibly awful games that have ever appeared since the invention of Spacewar!. They won’t all be bad games, but we’ll make it our mission to find the really, really weird stuff. Our second game is the bizarre Seaman:

Let me paint you an imaginary picture, follow it if you can: a little squid creature gobbles up a bunch of eggs, only for the eggs to eat the squid from the inside out, and burst out as tiny little fish. The fish then begin to kill one another until just two remain, one male, one female. The fish then mate, which causes the male to drop dead leaving a pregnant female who also dies once she gives birth to an egg. Tadpoles then spring from the egg, eating each other until they too are left with a mating male and female. The female gives birth to a frog, and the frog leaves the water for the wider world. Follow that? Well if you thought that was a bit odd, what if I told you that those creatures all have human faces, are all called Seaman and speak with the voice of Leonard Nimoy.

Seaman was an experimental game released in 1999 for the Dreamcast. It was unusual not only because of the weird fish creatures that formed the core of the game experience, but also for the implementation of voice control. Seaman was essentially a pet simulation tamagotchi game in which players cared for a range of aquatic lifeforms. You could feed Seaman, adjust his tank’s temperature and help him breed, but the key element was the Dreamcast microphone that came packed in with the game. With this, you could literally talk to Seaman and he would respond in kind.

As mentioned, Seaman was voiced by Leonard Nimoy (Spock, or... well, Leonard Nimoy from Futurama to you and me) which works out as weirdly as you’d expect. While the voice doesn’t exactly fit the bizarre visual appearance of Seaman (the face was actually a copy of the game’s producer Yoot Saito), Nimoy’s authoritative tones perfectly fit Seaman’s dry wit. Players could directly interact with the fish-human hybrid through the microphone. You could talk about a variety of subjects including relationships, history and general knowledge facts. The more you talked with Seaman, the better he’d get to know you; his responses would relate back to previous conversations and he’d remember things like your birthday.

The game was notoriously difficult and Seaman could easily die if he wasn’t given enough attention. Rather than guide players through the gameplay, Seaman threw players into the deep end (sorry), forcing them to learn how to keep their creature alive by their own merit. The creature itself would lend some help every so often, but on the whole it was down to the player to work out the best methods of survival. Just to make it all a little more surreal, Seaman would often critique and comment on your ability to care for him. He was a bit of an arse, really.

While obviously interesting for its own incredible weirdness, the game also stands as a clear predecessor to the voice controlled games of the 21st century and the numerous pet simulation titles that would follow. Nintendogs is probably one of the most significant games to be inspired by Seaman, Sony’s Eyepet is also a much more sensible version of the same core concept. Yet it’s Microsoft’s Kinect that the game resonates with most of all. Not least because the voice command elements of Seaman were notoriously wonky. Would Kinect ever had existed without Seaman?

Yeah, probably. Still, it’s one to remember. Not that you were likely to forget.

That’s all for this week. Oddities goes live every Friday afternoon, so keep an eye out for the next edition. Feel free to note your favourite oddball games in the comments, I could even choose one to focus on in a later edition!