A little under 25 years ago, a particularly bizarre game was released for Sega’s Dreamcast. In actually, calling it a “game” might be something of a stretch. It was more of a pet simulator, where you need to feed and care for a virtual animal as it grows. Except rather than something like a dog or a rabbit, your pet is a talking fish with a human face that doesn’t seem to like you very much. Oh, and Leonard Nimoy is there too for some reason.
Most people in the world don’t even know this game ever existed, and frankly, their lives are all the better for it. But for those who lovingly cared for (or intentionally killed) one of these rude creatures back in the early 2000s, it’s an experience that sticks with you. Which we assume is why [Robert Prest] decided to build this incredibly faithful physical recreation of Seaman.
The creature itself is a wireless animatronic that’s been fitted with several servos to operate not just its creepy human mouth, but its flippers, legs, and tail. [Robert] pulled the original speech clips from the game, and recreated most of the voice recognition prompts so he can converse with his pet monster. A Dreamcast controller is used to interact with the robo-seaman, but even that’s a bit of a hack. It’s actually just the shell of the controller which has been filled with new hardware, namely an ESP8266 and Nokia LCD that take the place of the original Visual Memory Unit (VMU).
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