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

I went to go check my physical copy of the Sonic Generations OST out of curiosity, and every single Sonic 3 & Knuckles track is listed as "Composed by SEGA" as opposed to a specific person, including all Sky Sanctuary tracks. All other tracks otherwise have composition attribution, with the exception of...the two Knuckles Chaotix tracks, which are also listed as "Composed by SEGA"! Do we know if that game had similar rights issues with its OST at some point?

 

The nature of CUBE's tracks was different from the M.J team; they were commissioned by SEGA in a way that they completely own the tracks, so it's not surprising to me that they write Sky Sanctuary as done by "SEGA".

The album "SONIC GENERATIONS: 20 YEARS OF SONIC MUSIC" actually does give Junko Shiratsu at least one credit for a Chaotix track. For Chaotix it shouldn't really be an issue as it was done completely in-house.
(Screenshot taken from the scans over at VGMDb: https://vgmdb.net/album/28705)


I assume you got the album titled "SONIC GENERATIONS ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK BLUE BLUR"... in that album, I've always thought the credits to be a little strange in small places. For example, people assumed Jun Senuoe composed S3's Balloon Park based on him having shared composition credits with "SEGA" for the track "MISSION 4". This was already sorta debunked by Jun himself, who had said he only did '2 or 3' songs, and all of them are the Bonus Stage ones. IMHO, the ones we got in the final game. (Jun's message being found here: https://info.sonicretro.org/Jun_Senoue_interview_by_LOst_(June_2002))

As "MISSION 2" actually combines Balloon Park with Jun's "Battle: Quick Race" from Heroes, I'm almost going to be cheeky and say the credits for "MISSION 4" was a bit of a quick copy/paste of the "MISSION 2" text.

 

So, about this-- OLIO is a series of three (doujin?) albums released between 1994 and 1996, seemingly organized and produced by Katsuyoshi Nitta (of Clockwork Knight fame) and MILPO. Many Sonic composers are featured in them, from Jun Senoue to Tomonori Sawada to Naofumi Hataya to Fumie Kumatani (she sings, even!), all with their respective circles? Apparently? There's little information about what the albums are, exactly, or how they came to be, but they indicate a somewhat high degree of musical exchange between composers who work for Sonic outside their work.

You can listen to them and learn more about them here, and you can find them on Soulseek too:

• OLIO (1994) -- Youtube, VGMDB
• OLIO2 (1995) -- Youtube, VGMDB
• OLIO3 (1996) -- Youtube, VGMDB

I can't imagine how you'd find the actual CDs, this is some obscure stuff. They have no pages on SEGA Retro yet, and I wouldn't know how to go about creating them, but I'd sure like to. I'm sure there's a lot to be learned about Sonic music from them, but I'm not sure how. Sky Walk, by Tomonori Sawada in the first OLIO, could be used as a "LOST SONIC CD DEMO FOUND" hoax anytime due to how similar its synths are to the ones Ogata (who also participates in this album) used on his Techno Power mix (I think the arrangement sounds similar, at least?); the song by Hataya sounds exactly how you'd expect it to. But I couldn't yet find any musical similarities that could so much as spark speculation. I haven't tried that hard either, though. I've been just enjoying them since a friend told me about them. Lots of bangers.

 

At least in this thread, the OLIO CDs aren't really relevant anymore since we're nowadays certain about the specific involvement of Kashima/MILPO, Sawada, and Senoue.

We got to focus on the more obscure SEGA in-house composers Maeda and Ogawa and understand which tracks were the ones from CUBE.
Last time, I kinda fell hard on my face with the assumption Sky Sanctuary was an in-house track (which it wasn't), but this made me think a bit more again.

But since we are mentioning albums now, let's head back to the first S3 album ever released, called 'Sonic & Knuckles Sonic the Hedgehog 3' (https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_&_Knuckles_Sonic_the_Hedgehog_3).


My new string of thought would be that the album actually contains most of CUBE's tracks; in particular those from Masanori Hikichi (7 and 8 are me simply noting the ones Takaoka did). Those were still fresh in the minds of the devs after Jackson hopped off, and those were lying around as MIDIs so it would be easy to hand them over to Akinori Minami.


I sorta forgot which people here had talked about Maeda programming his music directly into the game. But I feel like this can be important. Another interesting small bit would be Maeda list of works on the old Wave Master page; unlike Senuoe and Setsumaru, Maeda only lists Sonic 3 as a title he composed music for, no S&K. A new belief that formed due to all these new factors is...

Tatsuyuki Maeda initially composed a completed set of music for Sonic 3 (together with bits from Sachio Ogawa, which I assume to at least be all the heavy and intense boss music) during its days as an isometric 3D game.
This version of Sonic 3 may have had less zones (closer to 3D Blast's amount of content), so this initial set of music was finished and only awaited polish from Setsumaru. From there, Maeda's work was technically done, so he got busy with his next game.
But... things changed and they had to return to the classic 2D gameplay, and they chose this opportunity to expand on the game. With this expansion, they would require new music, so they had to squeeze out as many tracks they could from in-house (Sawada doing the theme song and jingles, Jun the bonus stage tracks) before having to resort to outsourcing the new zones to CUBE.

Folks like Sawada may not remember clearly who did the Sonic tracks as he wasn't around for long past his bits, same for Jun; they weren't around when Maeda and Ogawa did their thing. Setsumaru was probably grinding a lot, constantly porting other's tracks (from the added SEGA tracks, to CUBE, and lastly the M.J team), so he understandably cannot recall the exact contributions anymore.

 

This next small thing, I need people to forgive me for theory dumping decades later without much hope of a resolution at the moment... or ever...

The following is one of the least backed-up things so far but man...
After looking at the non-existent info on this 'Masanori Nakayama'/'Studio WHO' I'm so close to outright believing it is an alias of Masanori Hikichi.

This 'Studio Who' either just being a small local indie thing at that time, or a way to hide his direct contribution for whatever reason - be it the heat of the project, or just wanting to stay low while still being able to tell companies behind the curtains "I worked on this".
He jumped companies three times at the very least, based on what is said on SEGA Retro; always seeking out those work opportunities, I guess. His current venture also seems to be an independent thing so I guess it's part of his nature.

 

I still haven't scanned it but might this offer new info? It's from the JP Sonic & Knuckles collection.

 

The part on the left, appropriately labeled "original staff", is a literal copy of S3&K's in-game staff roll (bar a few spelling differences, e.g. "Sinobu" instead of "Shinobu").

The part on the right, instead, might answer a different question (maybe off-topic here, though): I wonder if those three "sound arrangers" are the ones responsible for the MIDI files used in the PC version? I, for one, am intrigued by this, I don't think we ever knew the story of those MIDIs.

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20190428033213/http://www.jam-st.ne.jp/usp/about/about1.htm

A quick Google of Unlimited Sound Project aka USP immediately gave me their portfolio, where S&K for Windows is listed. While it's not specifically noted what they did, other entries around the same talk about MIDI work or Audio digitalization so it's easy to assume they only did that. Masaru Setsumaru being the coordinator makes complete sense since he was basically in charge of the music library and would be the best person to be aiding in porting it over from the Genesis chip.


(this screenshot is machine-translated; it's actually written in Japanese)

 

I think Masaru Setsumaru at the time worked as a supervisor for the recordings (all sfx etc) and MIDI production. Not actual arrangement/recording work. It was a lot to be done and he had to coordinate the different teams in order to integrate them into the collection.

About the MIDIs themselves, I believe they were made entirely by USP and I've talked with Goro Takahashi about it in 2022.

He worked as a freelancer for USP back in the day. While he doesn't remember much, he says many of these MIDI versions sounded familiar.

Here's the original reply I got from him. He was very kind:

 

Holy shit this again lmao


Alright so I mentioned this before in the Sonic 1 source code thread, but Sega really likes carsmashing two ways to romanize English in the same sentence. It bares repeating because few would know why it's spelled differently but yeah it's really common
We can add S&KC to that list now. I should probably compile all of the instances they've done this... would be pretty funny actually

Fuck it, we ball. Link

 

I know

 

I've been doing research on this topic, following this issue now for probably 15 years, and every time I see this thread get bumped up, it's always a bit disappointing to see that no new information has come out despite all the great effort dozens (hundreds?) of people have put into this over the years.

Unless there is an internal document somewhere that has the credits, I don't think we'll ever get the full answer. We more or less know the MJ/Buxer tracks, have deduced a handful of compositions with a fairly high degree of certainty (Sky Sanctuary), and there's strong evidence for other tracks, but for the most part, I'd say 80-90% of the tracks are unconfirmed.

I have few personal anecdotes related to this topic.

• My cousin has been a freelance composer for 30+ years now and is in fairly high demand. Some years he puts out an insane amount of material, the vast majority of which he never sees implemented in the final "product" (e.g. YouTube ad). He'll get requests like "write a 30 second upbeat frosty-sounding tune that will go into a YouTube ad for snow shovels". He'll spend a few hours on it, send it off, and move on to the next request. Sometimes he'll get the finished product back, but for the most part, he doesn't even know what happened unless he checks - not like he owns it anyways. If you asked him about a tune he wrote 30 years ago, there's almost no chance he'd remember it, even if he listened to it.
• Last year I watched an interview with an artist who failed to recognize artwork he submitted that ended up on a book cover in the mid 1980s.
• Recently I came across a massive pile of music I wrote in the late 90s/early 2000s. A ton of old MIDIs I thought I had lost for good. Aside from a handful of tunes that I remembered, I literally didn't recognize maybe half of the songs and was shocked that I had written them.

The fact that the composers are so fragmented, 30 years have passed, staff have retired/left/passed away, and not to mention the whole MJ issue that has kept everyone tight-lipped... it's the perfect storm for the current situation.

And it's a tragedy, because we're talking about one of the greatest video game soundtracks of all time, and no one knows who composed most of this masterpiece.

 

Absolutely agreed... I don't believe the vast majority of us tried to get in contact with SEGA staff or contractors to stir up more of the M.J controversy; we just want to properly credit and thus, truly honor people for those tracks.
I wish SEGA understood this and would be making a real effort; I don't see the issue with simply being open about the song credits, they got the rights to them.

While I generally agree that it's easy to forget your own songs after such an insane time, Mr. Setsumaru still seems to recall what tracks were in-house or not (as he was very blunt about Sky Sanctuary).

Sonic 3 is one of the biggest games ever, after all (or at least, one of the biggest SEGA games), which is why I think there's still a slightly bigger chance than usual of people still remembering what songs they did.
The biggest roadblocks remaining in my personal opinion are the inability to contact Mr. Maeda and Mr. Hikichi's refusal to answer, unfortunately. If those two things were to get resolved somehow, I would probably be able to finish this chapter for myself, at least.


Edit: I did contact Mr. Hikichi... and he, indeed, unfortunately can't say anything in regards to Sonic 3. I'm sorry for making yet another wild attempt there at contact with someone, but I at least wanted to have some message from him out there. I did have to use Google Translate so pls don't hit me for any horrendous Japanese on my end.
(Link to the tweet: https://x.com/masanori_pf/status/1814478363312181525)

 

I think the biggest issue is also the Cube/Opus contributions. Cube supplied 8 tracks to the game, no idea what OPUS did exactly. Chances are they were written by staff/freelance composers who submitted them and may have never thought about them since, never played the game, never got credit etc. Those names may be lost to history forever.

Interesting - thanks for posting an sharing this information. From my fairly rudimentary Japanese plus Google translate, it looks like he legitimately either doesn't remember or wasn't even aware that he may have been working on Sonic 3 through Cube.

 

It's not simple as that, as you can imagine and have seen multiple composers say they cannot talk about S3. If the people involved can't talk, neither can the company. They can have the rights to the tracks but had to settle with never revealing the composers name due to a legal procedure or missing official information.

An example of this case: between May 2019 and May 2020, WWE was absolutely prohibited to mention who their music producers after they rescinded with the previous music group, even on social media, they had made a cover of someone's song and they could only mention him not the new producers. That was 1 year, but it can take years, decades, or an eternity.