How Yoot Saito designed the quirky Seaman for Sega Dreamcast

Yutaka “Yoot” Saito made one of the most memorable titles in video game history, Seaman for the Sega Dreamcast. And he delighted his fans at the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco by giving a post-mortem on the absurd game with a talking fish 18 years after it debuted.

Saito, 54, is still making games in Tokyo. But he is best known for Seaman, which has become a cult classic because it was such an unlikely and unexpected title. In the game, you used a microphone to communicate with a very rude and unpleasant fish with the face of a man. It was exactly the kind of game you would never predict would be a commercial success, and that is why it was. It is still looked upon with endearment and as a good example of artificial intelligence in a video game.