Michael Jackson Involvement with Sonic 3
From Sonic Retro
At one point in development, Michael Jackson brought a team of his musicians to be involved in Sonic the Hedgehog 3's soundtrack - however, due to the scandals that arose around this point, this plan fell through. Howard Drossin would complete the soundtrack, which was later used in Sonic & Knuckles. Brad Buxer, Doug Grisby III, Bobby Brooks, Darryl Ross and Geoff Grace all lent their work to Sonic the Hedgehog 3's soundtrack; all of the above worked with Michael Jackson at some point in time.
A discography of another musician working on the game, Cirocco (appearing as 'Scirocco' in the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 credits), lists a song 'The Water' as being composed by Michael Jackson and belonging to Sonic The Hedgehog. [1]
Although uncredited in the game, it is assumed he composed many well known tracks in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. This was revealed in a recent interview with Roger Hector, who was the General Manager of the SEGA Technical Institute for many years:
- Q: Which of those was your favorite project?
- Roger Hector: Sonic 3 (also called Sonic & Knuckles) was a lot of fun, but it was also very difficult. Michael Jackson was originally brought in to compose all the music for the game, but at the very end, his work was dropped after his scandals became public. This caused a lot of problems and required a lot of reworking. But the game turned out great in the end.
However it seems that his work from the game wasn't actually dropped, as much of the music featured in Sonic 3 has cropped up elsewhere:
- Jam: The similarity between this track and Carnival Night Zone was spotted by Ben2k9 before it was even known that Michael Jackson worked on the music for Sonic 3. The track itself isn't similar, but there is a "downwards fall" that sounds very much like the same fall in Carnival Night. Carnival Night also uses a small sample taken from "Jam".
- Who is it: This track, when sped up, has an almost identical chord structure and texture to the very popular and over remixed Ice Cap Zone. This was first noticed by Dioxaz.
- Stranger In Moscow: This track is the cream of the crop. It sounds exactly like the end credits of Sonic 3. Funny how both MJ and Dreams Come True (whose band member Masato Nakamura help composed music for Sonic 1 and Sonic 2) decided to use ending music elsewhere, or vice versa. This was discovered by Shade.
It makes sense to assume then that in the PC game Sonic & Knuckles Collection, the music tracks that are replaced are the ones written by Michael Jackson.