The "Sonic The Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles" Quest for Music Composer Research

https://retrocdn.net/File:SegaPower_UK_42.pdf (Page 8)



May 1993 issue of SEGA Power. Not much but mentions a possible future Sonic appearance alongside MJ at some point!

 

Brad Buxer recently did another interview where he briefly mentions his work on the Sonic 3 soundtrack. I think this info is partly already on the Retro wiki for Sonic 3's music, but it's interesting nonetheless.


Sonic stuff comes in at around 2:45 into the video.

The main info to takeaway from here:

• Brad describes himself seemingly as the main composer which he's done before. He mentions the 41 cues he brought to Michael who only worked on a couple before letting Buxer handle things.
• He elaborates more on how he started playing the Sonic 3 credits theme for Michael in a hotel room one day, catching Michael's attention so much that they expanded on it and finished what became Stranger in Moscow in only a couple of hours.

Sure wish we could hear that demo tape.

 

So one of the songs with some of the largest copyright trouble is a song that basically was ripped off from themselves?

If hart times wasn't the pinnacle of copyright issues, i don't know what is

 

Hard Times was only officially released in 2008 and it was unlikely it would surface at all until Fervor got the master tapes around that time. Highly unlikely it would be the "pinnacle" of all the troubles facing Sonic 3. Again, you're reading things at surface level and not thinking about the details.

 

Small news, during the Sonic Livestream today Marble Garden act 1 was officially credited to have been made by Miyoko Takaoka

 

That is a BIG deal. When was the last time an official source credited a specific composer for any S3&K track, aside from Howard Drossin's contributions?

 

For anyone who wants to see the specific point, it was during the G fuel taste test at 27:45

 

I do have some demo version of Stranger In Moscow. Not sure if they are from this period specifically. The tempo is a bit more akin to the Credits Roll. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post them because it is copyrighted material.

 

I'd presume you're fine since you're not profiting of of it and you're not claiming it as your own. I'm pretty sure just sharing a demo tape isn't copyright infringement.

 

Sharing a demo tape is copyright infringement.

Whether anyone will care that you're sharing demo tapes from a 25-year-old song is another matter.

 

Wait, can we be certain they didn't simply DL a random track with that metadata already embedded? I mean, from the look of that player it could have been a .VGM file for In_VGM running on WinAMP.

 

@ 13:57??

 

That’s most definitely the Sonic 3 credits theme.

 

I’m the guy Joe is talking about here. I never post here and found this thread by chance while browsing for Sonic 3 music samples. Hi Joe!

I did indeed work in the Japanese games industry for a while, but I had nothing to do with Sega. Earlier this year, in Tokyo, I happened to have dinner with a Sega employee. He had nothing to do with Sonic or game development - he was in charge of logistics around big arcade installations, heavy-duty hardware stuff. He’d been there for years.

We got onto the subject of that Mega Drive Mini console that came out last year. Completely unprompted, the guy mentioned that apparently Sonic 3 had been left off because of a music dispute with Sony. He had no more details than that - it was just something he’d heard inside Sega. So then, of course, I brought up the MJ story. And it turned out he’d never heard of the MJ thing.

As Joe said, it seems a strange coincidence that Sony was MJ’s record label at that time, so it makes me wonder if Sony is involved in the whole mess somehow. I don't know anything about how legal stuff works in music, but I wonder if it might not just be a question of copyright ownership but also publishing rights.

Of course, it’s totally possible that the guy was just passing on another garbled version of a story that, by now, has had almost 30 years to mutate inside Sega. As I said, he had no connection to game development, and he could have been totally misinformed or mixed up.

And, of course, none of you guys can know I’m not making this story up in the first place, let alone whether that Sega guy was talking out of his ass. So as far as scoops go, this is pretty low-value. Sorry about that. But it was a fun dinner!

 

Because we know at least two specific songs were directly sampled from MJ's Dangerous album, and Sony still has the rights to release MJ's music, it makes sense they'd get involved. I'm not sure exactly how it works in Japan, but in America, if you sample a sound recording, you have to get permission through the copyright holder, which in this case is both Sony and the MJ estate. Add on Brad basically creating a cover of Hard Times for ICZ, and you got a lot of red tape to cut through.

 

If it helps, Flying Battery Zone and Death Egg Zone have very similar basslines. I noticed this when I was making a remix. Let me know if it'd be helpful to showcase their similarities. Point of mentioning this is -- whomever made one, may have also made the other so it could hit two birds with one stone.

 

Sorry if this question has already been answered.

With all the (supposed) music rights disputes going on, how come Sega was able to release Sonic 3 & Knuckles on Steam? It's part of their emulation collection granted, but still it's the OG ROM with all the tracks.

 

The Steam release came in 2011, before (we became aware of) any legal issues. It seems like Sega can still sell previous rereleases (e.g., the Xbox 360 version was made playable on Xbox One in 2016 through backwards compatibility).

 

With that said, shouldn't Sega be able to release a Sonic 3 (& Knuckles) remaster on the PlayStation if they work out how to split the profits? Then again, leaving out the Xbox and the Switch would indeed look suspicious and attract even more attention to this mess.

 

There is almost zero chance Sega would agree to that, unless they added something to make exclusivity worth it, like a documentary behind the music, or an album based on demos Jackson and Buxer made; and even then, I still doubt Sega would want it restricted to one console, nor would they want to split the royalties several ways. Because in that case, before Sega sees a dime, they have to pay:

- Brad and the Jetzons
- The Estate of Michael Jackson
- Sony Music
- Teddy Riley
- The Estate of Heavy D (and by extension, Universal Music)
- Possibly the Estate of James Brown
- and not only the rest of the guys on MJ's team, but anyone else who worked on the game who might want a slice of the pie.

For Sega, that ain't worth it, and I can't wholly blame them.