Developer Vivarium Publisher Sega Format Dreamcast Release 1999
Out of the mouths of babes comes unexpected wisdom. In the case of Seaman, the babe is a fish with the face of an adult man. You’ve raised it diligently for weeks – hatching eggs, watching amoebae grow into gilled creatures that eat their brethren and then embark upon a secret, more complex third lifecycle – before it comes out with it. “Do you think the Internet is dangerous?” Seaman asks. You enter into a nuanced dialogue. It weighs up the advantages and disadvantages: the potential for conversation free of cultural prejudice or gender bias, the risk that without the need to leave our homes we might forget how to communicate face-to-face. It quizzes you about your views on Internet censorship. In the end, Seaman concludes: “It’s up to you humans to figure out how to use the Internet intelligently, so that it won’t harm you.” Oh dear.
There are tech billionaires that aren’t operating on the same intellectual level. That would spawn into the world in 1999 is almost astonishing. Evenwas one of the first mainstream games to tie in-game occurrences to a realtime clock, and to employ voice-recognition technology via its bundled microphone peripheral. (Perhaps unsurprisingly for a game in which you could talk to this creature, it clinched the Gameplay Innovation win over and in 2000’s Awards.) It was ahead of its time. What’s more shocking is that, a quarter of a century later, it still manages to feel contemporary.
