25 Years Later, Seaman Remains an Absolute Original. Too Bad You Can't Really Play It These Days.

It has always been easy to know what Yutaka “Yoot” Saito was all about in his games, without even playing them. All the hints you needed were right there in the name of the studio he founded in 1996: Vivarium. Saito named his small development house after ecosystem enclosures used for observing and researching, a semi-controlled environment for plants and animals—a place for life, to pull from the word’s Latin etymological roots. 

Those concepts were often at the core of Saito’s projects, both before and with Vivarium, and never is that more obvious than with 2000’s cult classic Dreamcast release, Seaman. Cult outside of Japan, anyway: in Saito’s home country, Seaman was ranked third on the system in sales, at just shy of 400,000 copies. That number isn’t going to blow you away without context, so here you go: there were just over 2.5 million Dreamcasts sold in Japan, meaning that something like one-sixth of those people also picked up Seaman, or, Seaman had a higher attach rate with Japanese Dreamcast owners than the critically acclaimed, literally-a-Mario-game Super Mario Wonder has for the Switch. 

Even with the game being more of a cult release internationally, Seaman still ranks number eight on the Dreamcast’s all-time sales chart, and it sold another 300,000 copies upon being re-released for the Playstation 2.

Sales are the least interesting thing about Seaman, of course, but a point had to be made here, which is that its cult status is context-dependent. Seaman was popular enough in Japan the first time around that its sequel, Seaman 2: Pekin Genjin Ikusei Kit, was the best-selling game in Japan in its week of release, despite being a Playstation 2-exclusive in 2007, well into the lifespan of the Wii, DS, Playstation Portable, and Playstation 3, and years after Seaman originally landed.

Part of its popularity had to do with how different it was from anything else out there—a point of pride for Saito both at the time and decades later—and it helped that Sega, which published the game in North America and was extremely hands on with Vivarium during its development even though it was self-published in Japan, was willing to add on the required microphone accessory without increasing the price. Per Sega Retro’s detailed record-keeping, the bundle ran for $49.95 in North America and about that in Japan, too (though they also had an additional bundle that included a Visual Memory Unit, or VMU, for about another $10—listen, things get a little vaguer when you combine inflation and currency conversions), which is also what titles like Sonic Adventure sold for at launch. Which is to say that everyone involved took a real chance here, releasing the kind of game where the game-ness of it would be debated, that required some unproven technology in terms of the speech recognition and learning of Seaman himself, and necessitated the use of a microphone that worked, but didn’t work, you know? At least not by the standards we might be used to 25 years later.

Another part of Seaman’s popularity came from just how much effort Vivarium put into making this all seem based off of actual, living events and beliefs. The website, the now-defunct (but archived) Meet Seaman, detailed the history of the creature dating back to ancient Egypt, the expeditions that discovered him, as well as the research projects that sought to unlock his hidden knowledge that had previously helped humanity advance by leaps and bounds. What was the Sphinx built for? That continues to be debated even now. Yoot Saito and Co. had a theory, though, and it involved Seaman.

It wasn’t just the website. The manual devoted itself more to backstory than to an explanation of the game’s systems, which, beyond the very initial tasks, you were mostly meant to discover yourself, through experimentation and with a little help from literally Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy served as the game’s narrator in the English-language release of Seaman, giving the player little bits of present-day backstory, welcoming them each day, and catching them up on the situation in the aquarium, too. When the gillmen start using the tubes on their heads to suck the blood from other gillmen in an evolutionary battle of survival of the fittest, it’s Nimoy who lets you know why the tank is feeling a little emptier than when you last left it, and also why the remaining gillmen are both larger and crankier. Crankier at and with you, specifically.

In Japan, Saito wrote a book that went to great lengths explaining the backstory of Seaman. It is 139 pages long. The entire thing has been scanned and loaded up for your perusal, if you’re curious: while it’s in Japanese, the book is also filled with art, as it’s meant to convey to you that Dr. Jean Paul Gassé devoted his life to researching Seaman, including drawing sketches of the various evolutionary stages. This is a frankly absurd amount of extracurricular activities to include for a virtual pet simulator, but Seaman was no simple Tamagotchi. Your Tamagotchi could give you a little animation of happiness to convey that it appreciated your care. Seaman would simply tell you how you were doing, and also ask you questions about your own life, with all of it progressing you through a story that went beyond just checking in daily on how hungry he was or how dirty the aquarium was. Not to spoil a 25-year-old game, but Seaman doesn’t end, exactly, yet there comes a point where you’ve done your duty and realized the dream of Gassé, and in-game you’re left with a friend you can go hang out with and talk to who doesn’t need you to take care of him anymore, at least not in terms of cleaning up after him and feeding. Just in the way friends can take care of each other, by listening and talking.

You spend the game in the lab of Dr. Jean Paul Gassé, where a single Seaman egg and some food pellets have been provided, which Nimoy will explain to you as you’re getting started. Set the tank to the proper temperature—you can use visual hints on the meter as it goes from a cautionary yellow to an affirming light blue to gauge whether the temperature is right, in the days before one of the Seamen will straight-up tell you that you are ruining its life by placing your hand on the dial—fill it with fresh air to improve the quality of the water, and then wait for the egg to hatch. The egg will produce some mushroom-with-tendril-looking things, you’ll eventually figure out that the shell you can interact with has a squid-like creature living in it—a hungry squid-like creature—and then nature takes its course. Oh, and then those mushroom things chestburst out of the squid thing, killing it in the process, and you’ve got your little baby Seamen to take care of.