Game News, Game Secrets, Interviews

New Details On Michael Jackson’s Involvement With Sonic 3

Gametrailers’ released a new episode of their Mythbusters-for-gaming show Pop Fiction today about Michael Jackson’s involvement with Sonic the Hedgehog 3. The first half of the video is a pretty good summary of what we know already along with links to where they get their info from (thanks for the hits GT), but at the 08:36 timestamp they begin to talk about their own research.

First off, they got to do another interview with Roger Hector, who stands by what he said in his interview from 2005. He also gives additional details on how Michael Jackson got to work on Sonic 3 and why his music was “pulled”. After that Gametrailers got an anonymous source to confirm that MJ did work on Sonic 3‘s music with again more details on what he did and a different account on why he wasn’t credited.

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15 Comments

  • Reply

    Thank you so much for posting this, we finally have closure on what is possibly the coolest gaming trivia ever!! 🙂

  • Reply

    Ugh, GT’s player sucks. Guess I’ll see if it’s on YouTube.

  • Reply

    Okay, that’s great, but I would really like to know which musician composed which song for the game. We only know about some of them (Jun Senoue, Howard Drossin, Masaru Setsumaru, Yoshiaki Kashima, Tomonori Sawada). But why sega never name the original composers for sonic 3 and sonic & knuckles?

  • Reply

    Something doesn’t add up here. Why would Michael Jackson brand the MoonWalker game with his name if he was so dissatisfied with the Genesis sound hardware?

    • Reply

      Holy crap, you bring up a really good point. Maybe his agents or whatever did everything for him so he never even saw the game.

    • Reply

      I think that’s because Moon Walker featured FM representations of existing music, that were modified to work on the FM chip. And I doubt Michael was involved with their conversion.

      Michael, however, WAS involved with directly with Sonic 3’s music, and was not happy at being limited.

      There’s a difference between hearing something scaled back, and trying to write something SPECIFICALLY to be scaled back.

      Does that make sense?

    • Reply

      I get what you mean, Speeding Hedgehog, but I’m still dubious about the sound hardware argument. If anything, it would make more sense that he would be dissatisfied with Genesis covers of his original tunes with reductions in quality, rather than ones that he specifically designed to be played by a Genesis.

  • Reply

    I wonder where “Black or White” would fit in Sonic 3… Still, I’d like to hear it done in chiptune. Please?

    • Reply

      While I cannot give an authentic answer, I will say that the beginning of the Azure Lake musical piece sounds very similar to the beginning of Black & White, if Azure Lake were to be slowed down a little.

    • Reply

      It’d be the end theme.
      Off topic: Holy crap I haven’t heard this song in years.

    • Reply

      There was a comparison posted on the forums:
      https://soundcloud.com/pglomba/black-white-michael-jackson

  • Reply

    Ever since i first heard about Michael Jackson’s involvement in Sonic 3, I was convinced. It explained why the music in the first and second half of the game had a distinctive difference in style.

  • Reply

    I can understand why Rodger Hector said what he said was to defend the Genesis console itself and as to those who refused to comment was purely due to the fact that they were getting sick and tired of the Sonic Fan-base constantly asking them is it true or not, they just want the damn thing to die.

  • Reply

    MJ will have been fine with the sound quality on Moonwalker because it was an MJ game. Regardless of music, he’d have got a ton of royalties for his likeness, music, name and whatever else involvement. Plus the movie tie-in money. He probably didn’t even listen to the soundtrack for Moonwalker when he saw how much money he was getting.

  • Reply

    Finally, my nearly 10 years of researching the matter is vindicated. I’ve had my suspicions for years.

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