Seaman

Seaman is back, introducing Seaman ASMR

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Over in Japan, Mt. Rainier coffee will provide customers a QR codes on their coffee cans to listen to the beautiful soothing sounds of Seaman ASMR tracks. According to the company, the point of the promotion is to use soothing ocean tracks to help people who suffered stress during COVID-19 pandemic. Seaman will have four ASMR tracks and occasionally say various things.

While at first it sounds like the company just used tracks from Seaman, the ASMR is actually being done by award-winning aquascaper Takayuki Fukada. The QR code will also allow the user to access AR images of Japanese cities, which will have Seaman appear. As far as the tone of Seaman in this promotional advertisement will be, is unknown. I would hope that Seaman doesn’t insult the people, considering its meant to be for people under stress.

While on the surface a Seaman ASMR promotion seems a bit odd, considering how long the franchise has been dormant, Seaman was actually the highest selling Dreamcast game in the region. I’d assume Mt. Rainier would want to cash in on fans that grew up with the game. I’m personally looking forward to when the Seaman ASMR tracks get posted online for my listening pleasure.

[Via: Siliconera]

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SEGA Talk Podcast #34: Seaman (1999)

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The often requested episode of SEGA Talk is here! Barry and George discuss Seaman, Yoot Saito’s strange SEGA Dreamcast experiment. Learn how the idea came about, the speech recognition tech that made the game possible, what Yoot has been up to since and more!

Support us on Patreon! Get early access, tell us what games to cover, and have your SEGA memories read at the end and more!

[iTunes – Stitcher – YouTube – Play Music – RSS – Download]

If you want to give us feedback, suggest a topic for the next podcast or want to ask a question for us to answer on the next episode you can add  them as a comment below or send theme directly to our email. Make sure you use subject line ‘SEGA Talk’ and as always, thanks for listening!

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New Dreamcast documentary speaks with Masayoshi Kikuchi (Jet Set Radio), Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Rez), Rieko Kodama (Skies of Arcadia), and more

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To celebrate the upcoming 20th year anniversary of the SEGA Dreamcast, the Japanese YouTube channel Archipel has decided to go talk to Japanese creators that worked on software for the Dreamcast. This is just the first part and the people they got from SEGA is pretty crazy:

Hiroshi Iuchi (Ikaruga), Kenji Kanno (Crazy Taxi), Masayoshi Kikuchi (Jet Set Radio), Rieko Kodama (Eternal Arcadia/Skies of Arcadia), Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Space Channel 5 / Rez), Tetsu Okano (Segagaga), Yoot Saito (Seaman), and Hiroaki Yotoriyama (Soulcalibur)!

Its nice to see some of these creators sit down and talk about their time working on the very iconic Dreamcast, pretty excited to see part two of this documentary series. If you haven’t seen Archipel’s content, you should totally check out other documentaries they have done.

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What is the most underrated SEGA Dreamcast game?

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Now that the console turns 20 years old over in Japan, the SEGA Dreamcast library has been dived into for over two decades, having people find buried treasure throughout the consoles library. But it still remains that a lot of hardcore users all have one or two titles that only they appreciate and no one talks about really.

So the question for this post is, in your humble opinion, what is the most underrated SEGA Dreamcast game? Of course this can have many answers and some of the choices will be personal. I could go on in this post talking about underrated games like Napple Tale, MDK 2, Super Magnetic Neo, Toy Commander, Cannon Spike, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, The Last Blade 2, Tech Romancer, Elemental Gimmick Gear, SegaGaGa, Record of the Lodoss War, Cosmic Smash, Seaman, and many more. But I want to hear your underrated Dreamcast titles and why you consider them underrated!

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Yoot Saito hints at a Seaman return

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“Don’t Panic!” That’s what the t-shirts read in a tweet from Seaman creator Yoot Saito (it’s also on the cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I doubt there is a connection). The tweet reads “Seemingly, a new project is being started. Guess what from the web-address on their back.” with the web address linking to www.seaman.ai which is currently shown as being under construction. We’ve covered a lot of Seaman news over the past five years, with the most notable headlines being “Nikkei reports that Seaman’s being revived on the 3DS” in 2012, “Nintendo trademarks point towards a new Seaman game” in 2013 and “Devolver Digital wants to make a new Seaman game” in 2015.

Could the mystery project be a remaster, a sequel, a Nintendo exclusive or a team up with a developer like Devolver Digital? Perhaps a Kickstarter will soon be launched? We’ll have to wait and see.

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Yoot Saito to host Classic Game Postmortem for Seaman at GDC 2017

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What?

The 2017 Game Developers Conference is just a little over a month away, and just last week it was announced that Japanese game designer Yoot Saito is set to host a behind-the-scenes look at the hit Dreamcast game Seaman in a Classic Game Postmortem. Yes, that’s right, I said “hit”. Despite the quirky nature of Seaman, it went on to become one of the most popular Dreamcast games in Japan – even outselling Shenmue!

The postmortem is set to be an hour long, and given Saito’s unique ideas for games it is sure to be an incredibly interesting discussion. The conference runs from February 27 to March 3, and date and time for the Seaman postmortem are still to be determined. You can learn more about the postmortem and GDC 2017 here.

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Peter Moore talks SEGA Dreamcast days in recent IGN Unfiltered Interview

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Peter Moore talked about the SEGA Dreamcast days in a Unfiltered interview posted up by IGN. The video is an hour and a half talk about the man’s career and what led him to be EA’s Chief Competition Officer. Some of the games that he said made him smile from the Dreamcast era included Seaman, Samba De Amigo and he even mentions Yu Suzuki’s SEGA-AM2 studio with Shenmue.

Peter Moore worked for the underdog brands which included Reebok, SEGA and later the Xbox division. Peter Moore is a interesting guy and this interview shows it with a few more bits like his son being a SEGA Saturn owner before he worked at SEGA, pitching his ideas to SEGA Japan and the mysteries behind his marketing TV spots. Really makes you miss the days of SEGA hardware, huh?

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Seaman creator returning to the gaming industry

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lancado-primeiro-no-dreamcast-seaman-mostra-um-perturbador-homem-peixe-que-conversa-com-o-jogador-por-meio-do-microfone-do-videogame-1344280599341_956x500.0Yoot Saito the Seaman creator who also developed games like SimTower and Odama will now be returning to creating more video games. He announced this while speaking at the fourth annual BitSummit festival in Japan where he said he needed to get out of R&D and back into making video games for money.

“That’s the motivation. Computer games make money.” – Yoot Saito (Seaman Creator)

Seaman creator’s last released title was 2012’s luggage friendly 3DS title Aero Porter and then Earthbook which was a iOS app that no one cared about according to Saito, which ended up losing money. He didn’t go into specifics as to what he wanted to do for his next game but he didn’t rule out a spiritual successor but said the average player isn’t ready for a brand-new genre. I have to agree with Yoot Saito, while I would love a new wacky crazy genre created by him, I don’t think the average gamer would care, sadly.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a spiritual successor to Seaman, even if its just a mobile phone app. As long as the microtransactions to don’t take away from the game’s unique fun factor. Who knows, it could be the next wacky app to make it big. What are your thoughts on Yoot Saito returning to game development?

[Source: Destructoid]

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Seaman creator on Iwata, talks about canceled Seaman 3DS game

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We know that Seaman creator and IP right holder Yoot Saito has been trying to get a Seaman game off the ground for a long while. We know that in early 2008 he tried to revive the game on mobile devices with Gabo, where your fish is more evolved into an actual ape, this is a year after Seaman 2 released on Playstation 2 in Japan. The game never got a release. We also know that as early as 2012 that Nintendo had been thinking about reviving Seaman on the 3DS and in 2013 Nintendo even tradmarked ‘Mysterious Pet: Legend of the Fish with a Human Face’, which sounds like a game we all know and love. Yoot Saito finally spills the beans on Seaman 3DS which he admits he was working on for awhile, in his farewell post to late Satoru Iwata.

He also talks about how he first met Iwata back in 1996 and how he gave him the job of looking for different types of games for Nintendo platforms. Saito also talks about how his suggestions lead to the Wii controller’s speakers and how him and Iwata experimented with StreetPass technically back in the original Gameboy days. It is a really a fantastic read and shows you why Satoru Iwata will be sorely missed in the video game industry. He was one in a billion. Read the translated blog post after the jump!

Continue Reading ➜

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Devolver Digital wants to make a new Seaman game

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Seaman

The Seaman franchise caused a lot of confusion for us here at SEGAbits when it was announced and, well, probably more confusion when we first played it on Dreamcast. That doesn’t mean the game didn’t have a fanbase, the game was the third highest selling Dreamcast game in Japan when it was released and the sequel Seaman 2 (Japan only) sold similar numbers when released in 2007.

In 2008 the creator and company president behind Seaman and Seaman 2, Vivarium Inc, actually tried to get a Seaman spin-off called GABO! on to the Apple App Store. Sadly they where rejected by Apple and doesn’t seem like the game ever came out.

Now flash forward to the present, Chief Financial Officer from the US publisher Devolver Digital has openly asked SEGA to allow them to handle a new entry to the Seaman franchise via the power of Twitter. Devolver Digital is known for publishing titles like Hotline Miami, Shadow Warriror and bringing back the Serious Sam franchise. The only issue I see here is that Devolver Digital is a publisher, basically what SEGA (and their other company they own, Atlus) does already (and has been doing for decades).

But since SEGA hasn’t done anything with the the IP in 8 years, can it really hurt them to license it to another publisher and get it off the ground? What are your thoughts?

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Classic SEGA Ads: It’s Evening in America…

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The Dreamcast had one of the best advertisement campaigns in video game history. Period. Its ads took all of the best parts of SEGA’s Genesis era advertisement and infused it with fun and consistent quality. Every single time I click a Dreamcast ad and expect something ho-hum, I’m surprised by yet another kick-ass ad.

Here we have a parody of the classic Reagan re-election ad, “Morning in America”. With narration by Seaman. And whistling by guys from Quake 3, NFL 2K and NBA 2K. And a bunch of SEGA characters screwing around inside people’s Dreamcasts. And while Seaman gives a beautiful speech about Americans coming together so they can whoop each other’s asses, you’ve got gamers celebrating and raging over victories and losses. You’ve got house fires, decapitated teddy bears and exploding trailers. This ad is a perfect example of a great SEGA ad: well written, well directed, well voiced, plenty of game footage and plenty to get you pumped.

This ad is a thing of beauty. I hope you enjoy it, have a fine Saturday morning and play some Dreamcast.

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SEGAbits Visits SEGA of America, Inc. in Sunny San Francisco – Part 3

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Welcome to the third and final part of our visit to SEGA of America! Check out the first part here and the second part here. In part three, we’re going to take a look at several rare, cool, and sometimes strange pieces of SEGA history pulled from SEGA’s archives from SEGA community managers Kellie Parker and Julian Mehlfeld. Consoles in their original boxes, cool accessories, rare statues, and a few items from the Kellie Parker Collection™ can all be seen after the break!

Continue Reading ➜

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Nintendo trademarks point towards a new Seaman game

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In February of last year, we reported on Nintendo wanting bring other publishers’ classic titles to their handheld, and Seaman was said to be one such game. Even earlier than that in 2010, Seaman creator Yoot Saito hinted that Seaman could very well be seeing a 3DS revival. Now, the blog Esuteru reports that Nintendo has registered trademarks that read very much like the beloved SEGA Dreamcast game. The trademarks are for games entitled “Mysterious Pet: Legend of the Fish With A Human Face” and “Mysterious Partner: Legend of the Fish With A Human Face”. While Vivarium Inc., the Nintendo 3DS, and Seaman himself were not mentioned in the trademarks, the previously mentioned news stories do support the possibility of these trademarks being a Seaman sequel or spiritual successor to Seaman. Siliconera notes that Yoot Saito worked directly with Nintendo on the Gamecube’s Odama and most recently developed Aero Porter for the 3DS.

What do you think? Would you want a talking fish in your pocket?

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Nikkei reports that Seaman’s being revived on the 3DS

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Hold onto your hats, SEGA fans! It looks like the world’s douchiest sea creature may finally be seeing a return…on the Nintendo 3DS. In what’s being cited as an initiative by Nintendo to bring other publishers’ classic titles to their handheld, Seaman has been said by Nikkei to be one such game. No other details were given.

We’ll keep you updated on this news as it unravels. The advantages to a 3DS Seaman title would include the system’s built-in microphone, its touch screen, and, assuming they go all out with this, you’d also of course get to see Seaman’s ugly face in full 3D!

Keep in mind that this is not yet an official announcement, but Seaman creator Yoot Saito’s hint back in 2010 that Seaman could very well be seeing a 3DS revival adds credibility to the story.

Thanks to Chaosmaster8753 for the tip.

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