New details on Michael Jackson involvement with Sonic 3

22 Comments

1. With this mystery solved, what can we speculate on now?

2. We can now speculate if Silver is related to whom

3. We can speculate if Hyper Sonic will return in Sonic Lost World.

4. We can speculate is we’ll ever have a Spectral Sonic (Sonic + all wisps = new super form).

5. I thought the biggest mystery behind the Sonic series was that mysterious Sonic ice cream…
   Either that or whatever happened to those Sonic 1 figurines that were so easy to find back in 1991 but became so rare after 1993
   Why was Metal Sonic part of that collection…
   Why was Splats there…
   Tell me your secrets, figurines…

6. Not wanting to say anything bad about the Yamaha chip? That sounds pretty fucking farfetched. It’s well known that Michael was a perfectionist anyway, I don’t think there’s any shame in admitting that 16-bit sound isn’t going to have perfect fucking sound quality.

   I honestly think the whole “Michael Jackson was booted from the project for his scandals” was just a massive confusion or lack of details given to employees. I mean, it’s already common knowledge that relationships between SoJ and SoA were pretty bad and that SoJ likely held some resentment towards SoA, so I can see SoJ not giving the full story to their “inferior” American counterparts

7. I thought it was rather interesting that they didn’t get in contact with their previous STI Sonic Team source (I can’t remember his name, the older guy who did the response over video) again after being contacted by their anonymous source.
   He could have had some sort of comment to make on that person’s comments. Maybe he refused to comment twice and they left that tidbit out?

8. An anonymous source, how convenient.
   I call BS, until that source steps forward and reveals his name. This “MJ wasn’t satisfied with the sound quality” line of reasoning sounds fishy. MJ said he was a huge fan of the Sonic games, so he must have known exactly what music quality the Genesis was able to produce and what not. There’s also the Moonwalker game, he didn’t veto that, although its music sounds worse than Sonic 3’s.

   1. Yes, but, the Moonwalker game was synthesized versions of existing songs of his. The difference is here, Moonwalker took existing songs and converted them to the Genesis soundcard.
      With Sonic 3, he was composing the music from scratch. From an artist to use high quality sound like MJ, to have to start using lesser as with the card from the Genesis, it would be a jarring experience.
      MJ may have liked the games and all, but if you’re made to work making songs for it, when its not your usual line of business, it could easily be a frustrating matter, to the point you’d give up and want to not be accredited.

      1. Nope, he wasn’t exactly composing music from scratch. Take Casino Night, for example. Some say it is a remix of “Jam”, which predates Sonic 3. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a remix, but Casino Night clearly has samples from Jam.

         If MJ didn’t know what Genesis music sounded like after his Moonwalker game and playing Sonic 1 and 2, then he was an idiot, sorry. If anything, I can imagine that he was dissatisfied with the quality of the PCM voice samples and NOT the FM synth. Think about it, neither Sonic 1 and 2 used voice samples, but Sonic 3 has quite a lot of them (“go!”, “woo!”, etc.). In glorious scratchy low-res quality.

         Furthermore, it is very unlikely to assume that Jackson programmed the hardware directly. The way that he worked is well documented. He wasn’t a classical composer who sat down at a desk and wrote down sheet music. Neither was he an instrumentalist who sat down at a piano or with a guitar. He was a gifted singer. He sang, hummed, whistled and beatboxed his musical ideas into a sound recorder. Which he then gave to one of his producers (Buxer, Cirocco, …). Or he bounced off ideas with them directly. The producers then would create the actual tracks, using MIDI sequencers, possibly recording some session musicians and of course recording MJ’s vocals. Those tracks would then be passed on to Sega’s sound programmers, to be rearranged and adapted for the actual console hardware.

         Maybe MJ wasn’t satisfied with the finished conversions – but he should have roughly known what’s possible on the console and what’s not. Maybe MJ really hated the FM synth as that anonymous source claims – as I said, I think that’s BS. Maybe he actually hated the scratchy low quality PCM sample playback instead – much more likely IMO.

         In the end, given MJ’s method of “composing”, which as explained above heavily depended on producers to do “grunt work” and arranging, it’s hard to say what music MJ actually invented and what came from his producers. Just read what Brad Buxer said about “Stranger in Moscow” – it’s known only as MJ’s work, but in actuality, Buxer “co-composed” it (I’m sure he’s being modest there) and played “virtually all instruments”.

         Taking all of this into consideration, it’s safe to say that while a few tracks of Sonic 3’s music have been touched by MJ, his real contribution in the final product is fairly small.

         1. You make good arguments, but your refusal to accept any information given in anonymity seems a bit… childish.

         2. @Chaotic, it’s more intelligent versus childish to not accept what an “anonymous source” says. “Anonymous Source” is not a good source on a school paper, or an article in a research journal. I have faith, as others, that the source is truly legit, but that’s all I can have: faith. No one can say for sure that anything that anonymous source said was really said from someone who worked on the project. You can’t prove it, you can only have faith in it.

         3. @Serpx
            The source is only anonymous to US, not to the people doing the interview. Their source requested their name not be given, for their own reasons, but it’s safe to assume that GT bothered to check the credibility of their source before choosing to go ahead and publish the information given to them. This isn’t a matter of an “anonymous source” slipping a note under GT’s door and GT just eating up every word – they’re merely protecting the identity of the source they have already identified (at that source’s request), both as a contractual condition for rights to publish the statements, and likely out of respect for that person’s job. Therefore, your source is GT, and the legitimacy of your information can be pinned to the credibility of the interviewer. You could easily use “An interview conducted by GT” as a source for a school papers.

            Faith is really all you can have when anybody tells you anything, unless you’re willing to conduct all of the research and interviews yourself. GT could totally make up a name for their source, or make up an entire interview and claim it came from Yuji Naka himself and just be fucking lying out their asses for all you or Needle would ever know.

      2. I would think that he wouldn’t like his best songs to be bit-crunched even more than making bit-crunched songs.

9. or speculate what Sonic’s real name is unless we follow the PENDERMAN VISION :-4

10. Gametrailers may say MJ did work on Sonic 3, until SEGA gives the full blown confirmation, we may never really know

11. 4/5 through the video and wow, what a climax!!

12. Didn’t someone from Sega respond to Sonic Stadium that MJ indeed worked on the soundtrack of Sonic 3?
    They said that shortly after his death like a month later or something…

13. @Needlemouse, regarding MJ’s displeasure with the sound of his own songs vs his being a “fan” of the game before, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he ended up simply frustrated with the process of getting the sounds to come out right. There’s an interview (here it is! http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=48415 ) with Masato Nakamura on the music from Sonic 1 and 2, and it’s really clear that they worked hard and had a lot of back and forth in order to get things to sound right. Nakamura was not a big shot at the time and was clearly really taken with the spirit of the project, but we can’t know for sure that Michael Jackson had that same level of enthusiasm, and he was already a huge success in other venues and had plenty of other stuff to do. No offense, I mean, I do like the songs in S3, but I don’t think they match the audio quality of Nakamura’s work and if Jackson was a fan, he may have felt the same.

14. There /is/ an interview with Brad Buxer in which he confirms his and MJ’s involvement with Sonic 3.

    http://info.sonicretro.org/Brad_Buxer_Interview_(Black_%26_White,_November/December_2009)

15. My thoughts on this? Both theories are correct, in their own way. The way I see it, the initial reason why Jackson left was because of his displeasure in the sound chip mangling his music, but – as the rumors speculated – he allowed the music to be used, so long as he wasn’t credited. The team was going to do just that, but when the scandals hit, they were told by the higher-ups that, if anyone recognized Jackson’s music in their game during that time, they could get in serious controversy, so they scrambled to change it. They couldn’t do it all in time, so were forced to sample some of the Jackson-produced tracks to fill in the gaps of their own music, hoping that the sampled music would get lost in their own tracks, and no one would notice. And, they were told to give the scandal story as the official word on why Jackson was dropped, as a result.

16. Well, at the very least, it looks like Michael Jackson got back on good terms with SEGA later, considering his involvement in the Space Channel 5 games. (I still get a kick, even now, of them calling him Space Michael.)

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