I don't hate that intro, but it really gives me mayor Superman vibes. Snow Valley was the forth world, right? Because I played SSS last night, and I can asure you the background music was Lost Palace from Team Sonic Racing.
no I like it too, I always thought the intro sounded like a Military Victory March and was Eggman's forces Celebrating the victorious relaunching of the Death Egg
It is completely unrelated to the rest of the song, but I like it too. My guess is that it's used to "soften" the music when you arrive in LBZ1 from the snow.
Does Roblox allow BGMs to be changed? If yes, that's what may have happened on the gameplay I just saw.
The existence of the November prototype and its non-MJ soundtrack would suggest a conscious effort was made to replace Carnival Night, IceCap and Launch Base after the allegations occurred (which for the record was August 1994 - a full six months before Sonic 3 launched). It's always possible that it might be like Chaotix where they put stuff in, took it out, then put it back, and our prototype came from the "took it out" stage, but I think if they really wanted these tracks removed and ran out of time, they'd have finished the job with Sonic & Knuckles (although Jackson had settled out of court by January 1994 so maybe not... though they still replaced some so idk). But it is certainly possible a full MJ soundtrack exists somewhere and was finished before Sega's. The Sonic 2 soundtrack seems to have been largely set in stone before they'd worked out what levels they were going to include, so hey, maybe. I wouldn't put any money on it though.
Based on the Iizuka quote that was posted here earlier, I’m assuming the team felt most of the music they already had was better and at the last minute decided they preferred a few tracks from MJ’s team. Though I do wonder if the molestation accusations are the reason Sega chose to be quiet about Jackson’s involvement - he was the biggest pop star in the universe at the time, ignoring the accusations, it feels a bit odd they wouldn’t be flaunting his involvement.
There is evidence for them using MJ's tracks because they honestly just liked them better than their own in-house work for those moments they were used. If they wanted to put in a new Knuckles theme for S&K, why didn't they use the one they already had laying around from the proto, and call it "new music" like they did for the miniboss theme? The answer: because it sucked. So they had Howard Drossin make a new one. Now if they can do that, I can easily imagine them thinking the proto themes for Ice Cap and the other two simply weren't as good as the ones made by MJ's team. The question is, why JUST those three levels? There are a whopping 7 zones in S&K, yet not one of them used a cue that theoretically would've been made by MJ's team. Either MJ's music for those zones sucked so hard they just weren't used, or SEGA was already wary of potential legal issues and chose not to use them. But if the latter is the case, then why doesn't S3&K, when locked on, replace ALL of the music with the in-house proto cues? It does so for the miniboss/Knuckles theme, why not the level themes too? They could've done so, and a few more cues couldn't have taken up THAT much space could they?
MJ could've been looking at doing legit prison time if he were charged and found guilty of child sexual abuse. Companies have severed ties with people for far less than this.... no way in hell could a kid's video game company risk being associated with him. I don't recall the exact timeline but I believe by the time the S3 ROM was final (probably December 1993) there was no way to know how things were going to shake out. And the first accusations came about 7 months before the S3 release, still a bit early to be hyping MJ as the S3 composer.
This might be where the "Michael Jackson wasn't satisfied with the Mega Drive's sound" thing came in. Maybe he didn't want to be credited. Pepsi chose to sever ties with him (I'm not sure when - that could be important), but I suspect given their history (and the fact an accusation doesn't mean "truth"), Sega probably just sat it out to see what happened. Jackson paid money to the accuser but also claimed it wasn't an admission of guilt - it's a situation worth avoiding if you can. Or Michael Jackson was barely involved at all and all this trouble actually comes from Brad Buxter. Which might explain why the MJ involvement has been denied in the past - it really was just his "team".
There's nothing that suggests the MJ songs had been in the ROM at this point and then removed. Considering the amount of stuff pre-split found, discovering an unreferenced MJ sample would be expected. And I really mean it. There are 68 sample IDs in the sound driver: the SEGA Team tunes just use 26. The inclusion of the MJ songs required 42 extra IDs (30ish unique samples) to render the complex percussion. I fail to believe they would do a surgical removal in the frantic development state they were in.
Most likely scenario: these Jackson team compositions were added early 1994 after the November proto. They likely didn't get more done due to the issues with sound compression - maybe they missed the target date on the sound files so only some could be implemented, then the whole thing was scrapped during S&K development.
I disagree with this statement, but to each their own. Other than the PC version of Sonic 3, no other version that has been officially released (as far as I know) has had the prototype tracks. I'd also like to note that these were the ORIGINAL tracks before Moonwalker Man came along (I think?). It's probably almost impossible to reach an agreement with his estate nowadays, and his "breakup" with SEGA doesn't help, either. Thus, I believe that replacing the potentially problematic tracks with the originally intended ones is the most logical and safest thing to do. Would you rather have a version of a game that has something somewhat new, or zones being silent or even removed altogether? Personally, I would go for the first one.
Yeah, I don't think the MJ music sticking in the final version was some clandestine thing of approval and quality, I just think there was a plan at the time and the game's massive rush to finish resulted in a grabbag incident. As for Sonic Jam, it's probably that they were directly porting all of the code, music and all to the Saturn and just didn't care to mess with music changes at all whereas the S&K Collection opted to fill back in the original tracks for either audio reasons or others. We've been musing a ton on all the hows, whys and so forth but without definitive answers we'll be looping in circles while some people keep disparaging one soundtrack or the other for their quality.
Another point of note - if the MJ soundtrack was created first, it might explain why the Act 2 variants are just simple re-arrangements - they were composed before the developers chose to go down the "unique Act 2 music" path. Or it was time/budget/miscommunication/nobody will notice. But this is wild speculation. Really I'm just posting to point out Sonic the Hedgehog 3/Development/Music, because that assesses the claims and counter-claims, and it's easy to forget who said what.
That first sentence is incorrect because the final build for Sonic 3 (alone) is dated November 20th, 1993.. that is the date the game is considered to be completed and the ROM image would be put onto cartridges to prep for release.. the McDonald’s promotion greatly impacted the game’s development because that was set to start in February so SEGA had to scramble like hell to get the game ready and this resulted in the split of the game in half. The massive crunch time led SEGA to go down the route of using the MJ tracks due to the beta cues not being polished in time and they probably didn’t have enough time to go back and completely scrub the MJ tracks during S&K’s development
^NINJA'D. I just want to state that the game was completed in November 1993, according to what's on the ROM header. November 20th, 1993 would be the build date of a release candidate that is byte-for-byte identical to the final version of Sonic 3, according to Hidden Palace. I sort of see the angle you're coming from, but taking into account the November 3rd build date of the prototype, even if it was a burn date and not a precise date signifying everything compiled and completed at that point, they still had the ordeal of working on an unbelievably short period of time to get as much done as god willing. Historically, Sega's development teams locally and overseas (in the weird company culture they worked in) have proved to have never been that good at working under pressure, either temporally or civilly. They, as a whole company both in the software and hardware realms, have made some brash -- no, irrational decisions, high and low level, that would later affect the trajectory of the company's future over the decades. Even at this point in time, and with Roger Hector characterizing them having "to kind of scramble" to get the tracks replaced, I wouldn't rule out someone in that work environment making frantic, unpredictable moves at the probable-literal 11th hour. I can only wish Main Programmer Yuji Naka can one day come out the "need-to-know-basis" thing and share his experiences as to what the final weeks of Sonic 3's development were like. *all the embedded links are just my favorite, best-known examples, btw.
The reason LBZ's intro sounds so jarring is mostly just its length. Nearly all classic Sonic intros are 1-2 bars long and they're usually not that downtempo. It's also written in a completely different metre compared to the rest of the song. Then there's obviously the fact that it's different from what we've come to associate with LBZ, but that's a given. I'm curious to see what Jun does with it, if anything.
I like it personally because it feels like an announcement that you just reached the big objective the entire game's plot centers around, and honestly like a lot of others I generally like proto CNZ and LBZ. I think with the right sprucing they can fit in beautifully with the rest of the soundtrack. Though when Mastered Realm posted all those rearranges a couple pages ago, my point about wanting a fuller song out of proto Ice Cap isn't just the auditory experience, but more notes and bars. I meant a more complete song because it feels like it's the verses working up to a chorus or reprise but it never really gets there.
My problem with proto LBZ, and to a lesser extent CNZ and ICZ, is it's too cheerful. Zones like Lava Reef or Marble Garden really sell the kind of atmosphere at that point in the story, but LBZ's intro reminds me of a national anthem, whereas final LBZ is like "This is it, Eggman's home base, it's go time". Final ICZ's piano really nails the feeling of isolation in a frozen wasteland, while proto ICZ is like "Weeee! Snow! Let's have fun!" Y'know? I'm not a music guy, but that's the best way I can describe it. I get that this is a cartoony platformer, but so was Donkey Kong Country.
The intro of PC/Proto Launch Base kinda reminds me of the US Air Force song for some reason. As a kid it sort of made sense to me: Launch Base was a base where stuff launched, and so was an Air Force base. It doesn’t really make sense nowadays but at the time it seemed like sound logic.
