I went through origins myself and from what I can tell all credits got removed from all manuals. Possibly a reason. CD: Original:
Managed to make the game freeze up in CNZ Act 1. I was Super Sonic and after travelling at a pretty high speed for a bit I hit one of the barrels on the outer edge and when it rotated Sonic round he clipped into the wall, freezing game. No idea if the fact I was looking up on the barrel had anything to do with it. EDIT: And in Act 2 I was gifted a lightning shield upon respawning at a checkpoint, despite the fact I didn't have one when I died nor when I hit the checkpoint. Neat.
It's such a specific move, I would think it was probably somehow contractually required. These pages are essentially redacted. @Kimberly noted that this is also the case on other manuals, too, so probably legal. Off topic, but I continue to wonder what the story is here, given that the sound credits weren't edited in Origins even though the songs were removed. My Occam's Razor theory: after reading the retro wiki, the newly unearthed Sonic 3 design docs from Origins, along with the recently restored prototype music (@Mastered Realm provided excellent insight on the small changes that show the Origins music is likely to be from an older prototype) and @Ben2k9's excellent Huffington Post article interviewing the sound composers & Roger Hector, I believe alongside the established facts that there are enough similarities in the collective recollections and available design docs to paint a picture: December 1992: Michael Jackson visits Sega, Yuji Naka is appointed producer Sega rejects Sonic team's idea that Sonic 3 should leverage the SSP1601 chip, citing the technology would not be ready in time for the game to hit the market Early 1993: The team creates level concepts detailing the zone themes and level transitions The decision is made to split Sonic 3 for the Western Release and hold releasing until 1994 Michael Jackson agrees to produce the soundtrack to the game Mid 1993: Jackson taps Brad Buxer to work with Sega on Sonic 3's soundtrack The Sega Sound Team and Cube worked on sound compositions that were most likely programmed into the game first Buxer and Jackson's team (Bobby Brooks, Darryl Ross, Geoff Grace, Doug Grigsby III, C. Cirocco Jones ("Scirocco")) recorded (41?) sound cues for use in Sonic 3 but only some make it in: Knuckles Theme Carnival Night Ice Cap Launch Base Miniboss Competition Menu Staff Roll The team apparently worked "countless hours" with the Sega sound team to get the right sound, however Buxer claims that ultimately Michael was unhappy with the quality of the conversion of the music August 1993: The allegations against Michael Jackson surface and create a media scandal Fall 1993: Sometime around this, Roger Hector received the cues from Buxer for the entire soundtrack Depending on which account you believe Michael Jackson is either removed from the project or voluntarily withdraws Either way, Buxer and the Jackson sound team are credited in the final release Howard Drossin starts working on Sonic 3 but that most of the music was already there - none of his compositions are in Sonic 3 October 1993: No Jackson sound team compositions found in the prototype from this period suggesting they were implemented later (it's dated 11/3/1993 but the headers suggest it was a working build from October) All minibosses including Hydrocity Act 1 use the S&K miniboss theme November 1993: The Jackson sound team compositions are implemented in the prototype dated 11/20/1993 Hydrocity Act 1's miniboss battle still points to the old miniboss theme after the drowning music is triggered, an apparent oversight a programmer made updating the music tracks to point to the Jackson team compositions There's enough evidence to suggest that contrary to Sega's narrative, the Jackson sound team tracks were hastily implemented near the end of development as opposed to removed. This hardly seems like an accident given the exact team is credited but one specific person isn't - Michael Jackson. The apparent issues around rereleasing Sonic 3 appear to have occurred after Jackson's death which leads me to believe that the Jackson estate has been able to keep this quiet while exerting pressure on Sega. Could this have been some sort of situation with mismanagement in the Sega of America office during that time? Was a work-for-hire agreement unable to be produced due to lack of proper documentation ala Ken Penders? If the Jackson estate has the original cues in a vault somewhere, do they know something we don't about the legally excised tracks?
...why would you not just make the pages blank entirely or remove them, rather than individually only scrubbing names? That seems really stupid.
what’s with the weird squeak sound that gets made shortly after you drop dash in S1/CD? Compression artifact or what?
I remembered some issue I had. This, more than a bug, it's a "feature" that bugs me. When people told me Knux lost the ability spindash immediately upon landing from a glide, I couldn't really notice, but I've noticed with origins in a much more worrysome way. So, I was trying to S-rank that hard mission from S1 that involves dispatching enemies quickly in a blocky custom layout of Marble zone. There was a glide to the right over spikes, then a pit and a wall, and, if you went down, a breakable platform and another glide over spikes to the left. To save time, I tried stopping my glide before hitting the wall and fall directly to the breakable platform, and, well, somehow it still counted as glide landing and didn't let me jump before the platform crumbled and let me fall to the lava below. That needs a fix.
That sound is made in Mania when you fail to execute the drop dash, either not holding the button long enough or hitting the ground before it's charged up. Except here it happens every time you do it.
I wonder if the blanking of the credits in the manual scans is a similar issue to why the Pixel Remasters of the Final Fantasy games are missing their opening credits?
I noticed that the loops in Sonic CD's music from the Taxman version aren't present in Origins. Was this by choice, meddling, or an error?
You're asking that from the same people who didn't bother to clean the game covers, images that are used outside the image gallery. Presentation wasn't a priority clearly.
I think I had the same thing happen to me. PS5 version. https://twitter.com/MykonosFan/status/1542036741749702658 I disappeared and froze during a mission last night, too. As Knuckles in this Sonic 1 "defeat enemies while gliding" challenge. I'm still a bit baffled by it. https://twitter.com/MykonosFan/status/1542586345616556034
Something I have been thinking for a while is: what if both narratives are technically correct? The M.J. Sound Team sent over 41 cues of which a lot were not used. Perhaps, the reason a lot of the cues were not used is because they were credited to Jackson when they were handed over to Sega? I know that Buxer claimed Jackson only composed one cue, but I can imagine they could easily have credited more to him to appease Sega (before he fell out of favour with the public). The tracks that remained in the game would have been those only credited to the other members of the M.J. team, explaining why only around half of the soundtrack used those tracks and why Roger Hector claimed that all Jackson tracks were removed. Meanwhile, Jackson himself was unhappy with the sound quality of the tracks, and Buxer, not knowing which tracks had been kept and which were removed, believed that this is why he was not credited (note his exact words were "if he is not credited for composing the music, it's because he was not happy with the sound coming out of the console", the "if" at the start of the sentence indicating that Buxer had no prior knowledge that Jackson wasn't credited). As for the legal issues, we know that Cirocco Jones claimed that there was a lawsuit going on and that Sega owed a lot of people money, so that could have easily been the issue preventing the use of the original tracks rather than anything involving the Jackson estate.
They're properly weird images. There's colour information in the transparent sections that you'll never see because the alpha channel is always really low: I don't know if this was an artefact of ripping these from the game, but it almost makes you wonder if this was how they were originally meant to be viewed. All it does is needlessly add to the file size.
Perhaps the truth does lies somewhere in the middle; there are some pretty dramatic differences in the last 2 documented prototypes of Sonic 3 and they only have a few weeks of build date apart. While it's strange to rationalize why they would go to the trouble of implementing any of the new cues at all when you already had existing composers working on the music, maybe there was just some sort of communication breakdown. It could be that somewhere, some sort of list was made of which cues were "safe" and which weren't and whoever was tasked to check the cues missed it on some of these 7, or maybe the sound programmers ultimately made a mistake due to crunch time... the incorrect pointer in Hydrocity 2 is the biggest indicator the Jackson sound team cues were mapped over the existing tracks at the last minute, relatively speaking. That means that from whatever period to roughly October-November of 1993, the tracks were programmed and then implemented in. This was a while after the media scandal began although Jackson's career didn't really get back on track until later in 1994. To suggest he fell out of favor with the public in 1993 is an oversimplification - he was still one of the biggest names in music and Sega would continue working with him for years. It wasn't until the 2005 trial that Jackson could be argued to fall out of favor with the public. By most accounts, he withdrew from many projects during this time citing stress and sickness (Stranger in Moscow was a result of this exact series of events, and even was designed from a Sonic 3 sound cue. There's also an exact quote that is less ambiguous than yours on the subject: "Michael wanted his name taken off the credits if they couldn't get it to sound better," Buxer claimed. @Ben2k9's Huffington Post interview with Buxer and the other sound composers in my opinion debunks any theory that some sort of legal issue originating from the sound team. Newspapers have different standards of what can be printed instead of speculation such as what you just did with Cirocco Jones. Why would they consent to an interview if there was a legal issue? Why is there no mention of any of that in the article? Why no record of any cases? Why do they remain credited in Origins when their music was removed?
Apologies if this one's been mentioned - on Nintendo Switch, in Metropolis Zone Act 2, sometimes the vertical conveyors with platforms looping around them won't spawn the platforms until well after they're in shot. In one of the sections where you ride platforms on one conveyor up towards another, I sat and looked at the one above me for a good five seconds before the platforms suddenly decided to spawn in. Seems to mostly happen if you're approaching them from the bottom rather than the side - didn't have any issues with ones that I ran towards horizontally.
The Jackson team credits bug the hell out of me, not because they don't deserve credit but if they're there, why can't we have their music? That's another point, the original credits were filled with nicknames and clunky organizations. They couldn't have updated that in any of these games? They did for CD anyway. Sonic 2 recieved some updates in its mobile port, Sonic 1 is the same and so is S3K which is odd since it's the newest.
