Tallarico Speaks Of Michael Jackson's Sonic 3 Music Involvement

17 June, 2014 19 January, 2025

This past weekend, the inaugural Sonic Revolution fan convention was held in Buena Park, California. Organized by the staff at our affiliate SonicRadio.net, the event had some fairly big names in attendance, including Sega producer Aaron Webber and Video Games Live! head Tommy Tallarico.

It’s Tallarico’s remarks that are the highlight of the show, especially with fans interested to know more about the purported, but never 100 percent confirmed involvement of the late entertainer Michael Jackson in Sonic 3. Jackson died in 2009. He was a passionate fan of Sega and Sonic, and it’s widely believed he had at least a hand in the production of Sonic the Hedgehog 3‘s soundtrack, only to be yanked and uncredited in-game as child sex abuse allegations against the King of Pop loomed close to Sonic 3‘s 1994 release.But in

the video below, recorded at Revolution, Tallarico has his own account of the story. Citing his own sources who worked in the audio and music booths for Sega around the time, Tallarico says Jackson was not pleased with how his music translated onto the Genesis synth, and requested that he be taken off the credit list prior to the game’s launch. Tallarico does use the word “confirmed” at the end of his explanation, however, affirming on his end at least that Jackson was fairly involved with Sonic 3‘s unique, if not derivative tunes. The Jackson estate has never confirmed MJ’s hand in production.

Watch Tallarico explain in the video below. We hope to have a little more coverage from Sonic Revolution for you later this week.

10 Comments

FINALLY someone speaks about it. No one would believe me…

Wasn’t this the same reason Brad Buxer cited like forever ago, the last time this was “confirmed”?

Yeah, at this point we can probably stop calling it unconfirmed.

He was involved ..we can move on.

This is nothing new.
We knew that MJ dabbled with making music for Sonic 3. But the big question is: did MJ’s music make it into the final game?
Tallarico doesn’t answer this. He says MJ wanted Sega to take his name off the project. I can’t really imagine that he said “keep the music, but don’t credit me”.
Plus, we already know that some tracks are by Scirocco or Brad Buxer, who might or might not have gotten input from MJ. Example: Ice Cap is by Buxer, taken from his band The Jetzons without any MJ involvement.

Do we really need any more confirmation? I think it’s pretty obvious by this point. Still seems ironic that Michael would still agree to his music being synthed in the Micheal Jackson Genesis game. I think the real question should be whether Jackson should be credited in future re-releases of Sonic 3? Clearly it’s up to the Jackson family and SEGA whether that happens or not, but personally I would very much like to see Micheal get some well-earned credit in any possible Sonic 3 & Knuckles re-release. But considering how he requested to be left out, it might be seen as going against his wishes if it were decided to credit him anyway. How to solve a problem like that is the true issue here, not whether he left for one reason or the other.

Needlemouse says:

18 June, 2014 at 12:58 PM

And for what would you credit Michael Jackson? As I said, as long as it isn’t clear who composed which track in the game, you cannot give proper credit.
Unless you want to credit him like this: “Michael Jackson got a tour of STI and wanted to make music for Sonic 3. He probably collaborated with his producers Scirocco and Brad Buxer, but to what extent any of his ideas made it into the final soundtrack isn’t known”.

Aaron webber was their too ! aww man my birthday sucked and this would have made it better

Ummm…repeating Brad Buxer’s words from 2007 or so is NOT News

Great, now that’s out of the way… What’s stopping SEGA from porting Sonic 3 & Knuckles to the PSN?
Or from them allowing Taxman/Stealth to… um… “remix” it like they did with 1/2.

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