If Japan’s Nikkei media conglomerate is to be believed, your 3DS is about to get a whole lot weirder.
Let’s do the backstory first: The year is 1999 and Sega has just launched the Dreamcast. The new console is awesome, but Sega is coming off a string of hardware failures, and is fighting an uphill battle against the emerging PlayStation juggernaut. The Company That Sonic Built needed some way to set itself apart from the typical videogame rabble. Being Sega however, that wasn’t enough. This theoretical game also needed to be totally insane, feature Leonard Nimoy (as, bizarrely, himself) and have a title so sexually suggestive that childish gaming journalists would still be making jokes about it 13 years later.
Thus: Seaman — a game that tasks players with raising a sarcastic fish/man hybrid that somehow completely lacks any of the appealing qualities of either species.
Even weirder, the game is surprisingly enjoyable. If you’ve never played it, imagine Animal Crossing, only instead of a town needing to be weeded, you’re put in charge of an ugly fish that needs constant emotional support.
(And people wonder why I love Sega so much.)
Anyway, according to a report in the online iteration of Japan’s Nikkei newspaper, Seaman is being resurrected for the Nintendo 3DS as part of a Nintendo scheme to bolster the handheld’s library with forgotten classics originally created by third-party companies.
Unfortunately, the report (which was handily translated by the Nipponophiles at Andriasang) offers no details on when you might see Seaman on your 3DS, nor any hints of how this Seaman might differ from the Seaman you were playing with at the turn of the century.
In the meantime, feel free to write up a list of childish jokes about the game’s title. Y’know, because it’s a homonym for sperm.
Source: Andriasang
