Awesome article on Sega-16 regarding MJ and Sonic3

Yes there is.

Is everyone suddenly forgetting that the similarity between Michael Jackson's "Jam" and Carnival Night Zone's music is not just a coincidence? The particular orchestral hit-esque sample used in that section of the song is sampled directly from Jam—you can even hear the guy say Jam in the sample! Not only that, but there are several other cases of direct matches made between sampled portions of different MJ music and DAC samples present in the Sonic 3 ROM!

Judging by the way that Michael Jackson's involvement is suddenly being hush-hushed by employees who spoke freely of it before, I'm willing to bet that SEGA has some sort of long-running fear of it being revealed that Michael Jackson had more involvement in Sonic 3's music than initially led on to. I mean, come on—the changed tracks in both Sonic 3 & Knuckles and the PC port of the game, paired with the stylistic similarities made in those tracks that were removed... shouldn't it be obvious at this point? The years we've put into researching this subject back and forth should make the conclusion bleedingly obvious by now.

Michael Jackson worked on Sonic 3's soundtrack. Period.

 

Damn, that's a lot of research. They sure didn't joke around with this, they were pretty thorough with the data they found. Although yes, I agree with Tweaker, I think the big MJ was definitely involved with Sonic 3.

 

I definitely believe that Michael worked on some of the music for Sonic 3. Bottom line is SEGA didn't want a child molester working on a child's game, so they dropped him from the project. And many people, especially parents, would have been angry with SEGA if they allowed Michael to continue working on a video game that was marketed for children, so SEGA had to keep it under wraps.

 

I'd be more inclined to believe SEGA would want to keep any MJ stuff under wraps not because of the scandal, but for some sort of music royalty reasons. After all, the Sonic theme was changed for Sonic 3 because the royalties for the original theme by Masato Nakamura were considered too expensive.

 

I'm not convinced that the music that was dropped from the PC port was done so for the sake of OMG IT'S MJ REPLACE IT NOW -- after all, it still showed up in the contemporary Sonic Jam, which also was a port; in fact, the music was all basically just a bunch of PCM streams and wouldn't have been hard to replace, really.

I assume it's a combination of the two theories, that they wouldn't be allowed to, for whatever reason, actually use those songs unless the samples were as well.

Certainly there are samples from MJ's work in there; thus he at least had an indirect influence, but I can't believe that the people who worked with him couldn't have had access to those samples themselves; I still say that it's a bit inconclusive. What strikes me as the most damning evidence is that MJ wasn't credited for celebrity appearances on, say, The Simpsons at around the same time; though this can't be used to prove he did work on it (naturally), it does certainly support that he did, but wasn't credited.

EDIT: There is also the fact that the tracks removed for the PC version had much less significant re-arrangement of the two versions between acts.

 

It would be nice for someone to say "Right ok yes MJ did compose this track and that track and we took samples from this track and he composed the knuckles theme" etc.... I mean im pretty sure a lot of the music in S3 is done by him and his team due to how it sounds.

 

so three statements from employees that worked with him during the project isn't enough apparently


also I was under the impression that Drossin only got a "sound special thanks" because very little of his work is even in Sonic 3 - it's all in S&K instead

 

The article sucks, IMO. This guy's dragging it down with his own opinion.

Oh, here comes the answer!

Wait, no solid evidence, only opinion. Bollocks to this article. =P

 

Why throw away something that can be recycled?

Somthing still isn't right here. Maybe SEGA was trying to avoid getting sued by MJ himself. With the power of YouTube he can listen to all his songs were were claimed by other people! At this point I would be happy if SEGA were sued over this. If they went bankrupt because of it, I'd be fine because they already killed Sonic....they are just reusing his corpse.

It's all hush hush smoke and mirrors....but please.....we all know the truth.

Knowing what they know now, they probaly wish they paid DCT to do the music once again....even though DCT wanted more money, it would have saved Sega a WHOLE lot of trouble anad grief.

 

Is this considered evidence?

 

No; I'd say it was pretty obvious from the start that Jackson was a huge Sonic fan—he'd said it on multiple occasions beforehand. Regardless, liking Sonic doesn't inherently mean that you've worked on Sonic; if it did, then a majority of us would probably work for SEGA at this point.

 

(Ah poo, my 'evidence' got tampered with :P )

It's not really concrete proof, it's just evidence that MJ may have been a fan of the Sonic franchise. Close though.

 

I know it's not really "evidence", it's just an excuse for posting a somewhat-amusing picture.

 

First time I have heard this! I don't think Sega is allowed to use any parts of MJ's songs as samples without his permission

I think they should better remove the samples from any later ports of Sonic 3, like Sonic & Knuckles Collection for PC

Seriously, they have stolen the samples, and they are not allowed to do that! If they had the original samples, it would be okay, but they are stolen directly from the songs, lol.

 

I thought Sonic didn't get big in Japan until Adventure.

 

I like how a interview hosted on Sonic Retro is used as a source on the article.

 

Can we make this world news now? How much do we hate SEGA to want to take them down with this? I'm all for it....they don't make (as many) quality games anymore...period. These few milliseconds of audio can destroy them. UNLESS they have MJ by the balls for something.

This may be a lot deeper than we think. I think SOMEONE would have told MJ by now about this (like his co-writers?!)...or maybe they were the ones responsible.

All I know is that something is terribly WRONG.

They should have stuck with DCT!