Jones remembers Jackson calling him on the phone – often late at night – to run over new ideas and sing melodies that would eventually find their way into the game.
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Though Sonic the Hedgehog fans have always been studying and dissecting the similarities between Michael Jackson’s music and the tunes featured in the 1994 game Sonic the Hedgehog 3; it appears as if all their conspiracy theory dreams may have finally come to fruition. More likely is the scenario in which controversy interfered, which the Huffington Post article touches on: Evan Chandler accused Jackson of molesting his 13-year-old son, Jordan, in the summer of 1993, about a year before Sonic 3 was released.
Now, Huffington Post has spoken to more members of the team that worked with Jackson on the music-ones who were also credited in the game-and they’ve corroborated Buxer’s story (at length, and you should give it a read for yourself). Tantalizingly, it sounds a bit like somebody may have the original master tracks of Jackson’s work. “There was no agenda beyond it other than, he really, really liked the game”.
Sound engineer Matt Forger added: “We were recording lots of beatboxing”.
Despite this, Jackson’s name would not find its way onto the end credits.
Three of the game’s six composers claim that they did work with Jackson and confirm the story that Jackson asked for his name to be removed because he wasn’t happy with the way the music was compressed and distorted by the Mega Drive. Lots of Michael’s mouth percussion…. And unless we get a statement from Jackson via Ouija board, it seems this well-reported piece will be the final word on an urban legend-turned-probable fact.
Given that Michael Jackson had released a number of Sega games based off his 1988 film Moonwalker, it seems unlikely that he would chafe, all of a sudden, at Sega’s audio specs when bigger hits like “Thriller” were adapted for less powerful systems in the Moonwalker games. Hector, on the other hand, recalls that the entire soundtrack had to be re-done by Howard Drossin. “People have accurately matched the songs to the cues”.
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That’s another video game myth put to bed, then.
