Before the panic about AI became an ambient hum in our daily lives, it arrived in stranger, funnier, more unsettling form. Before voice assistants became household fixtures and AI crept into the rhythms of our daily lives, long before Siri chimed in from the kitchen counter or Alexa responded to timers and trivia, a creature with the bored expression of a man trapped in a fish’s body invited you into a kind of relationship that felt, in its way, profoundly human in 1999.
You altered the levels of water. It was fed crickets. You waited. And waited. There was a lot of waiting. Then out of nowhere, he’d stare straight through you with the bemused detachment of a Lovecraftian therapist, asking why you’re still single, or whether you’re really happy with how your life is turning out. It asked questions you weren’t ready to answer. It could have been asking you if you thought you were a good parent, or it could have interrupted your contemplative pause with a resounding, “That hesitation says a lot.” All of a sudden you weren’t just playing a game anymore. You were having a conversation with something that looked like it had better things to do. The deeper you went, the weirder it got. It asked if you’d ever cheated on a test. If you asked it a philosophical question, it might redirect with a tone that wasn’t dodging the question so much as challenging your right to ask it in the first place — “Let’s not pretend you’ve thought that through.” The thing would even accuse you of being selfish or lazy, depending on how consistently you fed it. One player reported asking it if it believed in God, only for it to pause and respond: “I think that’s your problem, not mine.”
This was a game, this thing, was Seaman. The Sega DreamCast launch title asked you to raise a sort of aquatic homunculus from a gelatinous, fungal mass; the engagement didn’t come from spectacle, but from curiosity. By any standard, the game itself was undeniably dull and irritating, albeit in entirely original ways, and the interactions had the feeling of being banal while also being invasive. In 1999, just the concept of raising something so interactive felt groundbreaking, or at least strange — even in 1999 the experience felt painfully slow, a clunky novelty that felt both oddly intimate and hopelessly analog — like attending a weeklong couples retreat with a Magic 8-Ball. You could speak into a microphone, and Seaman would respond — docilely moving his oddly manlike face, causing his limp fish proboscis to drift in the water with his indifference. Sometimes Seaman would remember what you said, sometimes not, and that felt fitting. Storing details about your birthday or your habits, and calling them back days later in ways that felt unnervingly personal. The actual experience often felt like watching paint dry, but that was the point: the mundanity was the game. You had to feed it, clean the tank, and show up every day.
Without those rituals, the creature would weaken or die. And in a subtle, unspoken way, you would lose. Seaman wasn’t trying to thrill you. It was modeling something else entirely: the way real connection often grows not from excitement or novelty, but from shared routine. Research in the California Management Review (“Empowering AI Companions for Enhanced Relationship Marketing”) proves this out, how routine and predictability nurture our sense of closeness with AI. Seaman demonstrated that intimacy may take root in silence, awkwardness, and the slow accretion of moments. With Seaman, those moments were almost always unremarkable, but maybe that wasn’t his fault; he was stuck in a gaming system with less processing power than a first-generation Apple Watch.
What if we brought Seaman’s scaffolding forward? With today’s language models — capable of tracking context, recalling past interactions, inferring intent with eerie precision — how much deeper might that companionship feel shaped by the wry detachment and bemused scrutiny of that amphibious curmudgeon? Imagine Seaman with a longer context window. Imagine it picking up not only what you say but also how you say it, including your hesitations, routines, and mood. Imagine that voice interface no longer tethered to a toy microphone, but woven into the natural rhythms of your speech. The technology, at the time, was a limitation. But the emotional blueprint was already there floating behind Seaman’s dull, bored eyes. Would Seaman’s insights sharpen with time? Would his observations lean more toward the unsettling precision of a Hannibal Lecter type, or the blunt, earnest charm of a colleague whose honesty outpaces their social finesse? We may never know, and that’s a real shame.
