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"Sonic 3" Music

Date range assessed by the facts that Michael “was walking around on crutches” at Sega, and he had “[sprained] his right ankle on Monday [March 8, 1993] in dance rehearsal” (LA Times)

Brad Buxer, “Black & White” magazine (November/December 2009) (translation by SegaLoco),

Black & White: Can see clarify the rumor that Michael had in 1993 composed the music for Sonic 3 video game, which you will be credited?

Brad Buxer: I've never played and I do not know what the developers have kept the tracks on which Michael and I have worked, but we did compose the music playing Michael called me at the time for give him a helping hand on this project, and that's what I did. And if he is not credited for composing the music, because he was not happy with the result sound coming out of the console. At the time, game consoles did not allow an optimal sound reproduction, and Michael found it frustrating. He did not want to be associated with a product that devalued and his music.

“Huffington Post” (January 25, 2016) (archived)

Of this, at least, I'm certain: One evening early in 1993, Michael Jackson hobbled into the Sega Technical Institute in Palo Alto for a visit.

The King of Pop, who was in the midst of his 69-show, $100 million-plus "Dangerous" world tour, had sprained his ankle dancing. And in early 1993, he was famous enough -- and uncontroversial enough -- to win last-minute, no-questions-asked admittance to the STI, a top-secret development facility for Sega's newest video games.

Sega, then the leading video game manufacturer in the U.S. in Europe -- and planning, according to a Wired article that year, to "take over the world" -- had a longstanding relationship with Jackson. In 1990, the company had released "Moonwalker," a game based on a Jackson movie. In it, players danced their way across a beat-'em-up game world, fighting bad guys and saving children. Then, in 1991, Sega debuted "Sonic the Hedgehog," which would become its marquee franchise. Sonic 2 came out the following year.

Jackson was smitten. And so, late one afternoon, Roger Hector got a call: Jackson would be coming to visit Sega. "He wanted to drop by and say hello," Hector recalls. "There was no agenda beyond it other than, he really, really liked the game. He enjoyed playing it a lot and he wanted to meet the people behind it."

Since Sega did not employ a receptionist after hours, Hector called his daughter and asked if she wanted to meet Jackson. "She was there in about eight seconds," Hector jokes.

His daughter, Leslie, remembers how exciting it was for her to "play receptionist" to Jackson and his entourage. "It's too bad this was pre-cell phones so unfortunately I didn't get a selfie with him," she said in an email. "[It] was a day I will never forget!"

Jackson toured the facility. "He didn't moonwalk," Hector said. "He was walking around on crutches and he was apologetic about that -- he said 'I'm really sorry' and all that. But he didn't have to apologize. We were just happy to have him."

Then, as Hector tells it, one of the Sonic 3 developers asked whether Jackson would like to write the music for the new game.

What happened next is still in dispute…

Sega maintains it never worked with Jackson on Sonic 3, and is "not in the position to respond" to questions about allegations to the contrary. "We have nothing to comment on the case," the company said.

But the men whom Sega credited with writing the music say otherwise. Six men -- Brad Buxer, Bobby Brooks, Doug Grigsby III, Darryl Ross, Geoff Grace and Cirocco Jones -- are listed as songwriters in Sonic 3's endgame scroll. Buxer, Grigsby and Jones tell The Huffington Post that Jackson worked with them on a soundtrack for Sonic 3 -- and that the music they created with Jackson ended up in the final product.

"It was really, really, really cool how they put what we did together in there," Grigsby says.

As Jackson's musical director, Buxer had a raft of duties. Along with managing a team of auxiliary musicians, Buxer created tracks from his own ideas and based on a beatboxing-style of songwriting Jackson would perform for him. So when Jackson decided he wanted to work on the Sonic 3 soundtrack, it fell to Buxer to assemble a team. "I was working with Michael on the 'Dangerous' album," Buxer recalled, "and he told me he was going to be doing the Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack for Sonic 3. He asked me if I would help him with it."

Brooks and Grigsby, who were already living with Buxer in a shared house with a music studio, were obvious choices. Ross and Jones filled out the group.

"It was a big secret," Hector, the former Sega executive, remembers. Sega "didn't want the word to get out at all." He says Sega gave Jackson a demo of the game. "He took it from there and started making music," Hector said.

For around four weeks in 1993, Jackson and his team worked out of Record One studio in California, creating "something like 41" tracks – or cues, as they're called in the video game world, Buxer said. Jones remembers Jackson calling him, sometimes late at night, to share ideas and sing melodies that would eventually make it into the game.

When Jackson recorded, he'd usually have a side room – a lounge or relaxation area – where he could take a break and kick back. Sometimes he'd play Sonic games. "None of us involved in this were really gamers," Matt Forger, a sound engineer who worked on the project, told me. "Michael was probably the one who did play video games to the greatest extent. So, for the rest of us, we knew Sonic the Hedgehog, that was a pretty well-known thing in terms of popular culture, and videogames in general, but Michael really is the core."

Jackson and the team wrote the music "high-profile," Grigsby said, meaning that although replicating the music on the Sega console would eventually require massive compression and simplification of the audio, they started out sounding like typical Jackson songs.

Sometimes, Grigsby remembers, Sega developers would drop by to hang out or help the team compress the songs -- which, according to Grigsby, were recorded aiming for a "cinematic type of sound" Jackson sought at the time -- into Sega-ready versions. "It all had to be squashed down for the game and they made more room for the graphics," Grigsby says. "They had more data happening with the graphics and they had very little allocated for audio."

The process "wasn't as we would normally construct songs for an album or another project of Michael's," Forger said. "We were recording lots of beatboxing. Lots of Michael's mouth percussion. ... He'd be laughing, joking, and that kind of infectious attitude would ... make the work not seem like work. Michael understood that this was for a game, he was in a really up mood whenever we'd be working."

"We did use a lot of samples made from [Jackson's] beatboxing," added Buxer. "We would chop this up and use it in cues. Of course there were Michael 'he-he's' and other signature Michaelisms."

On Sept. 14, 1993, Chandler -- a "dentist to the stars" who also co-wrote the comedy "Robin Hood: Men In Tights" -- sued Jackson for allegedly molesting his son. When Chandler made his accusation public and it turned into a worldwide scandal, he reached a financial settlement with Jackson to avoid court. "Michael Jackson's career may be ruined, even if child abuse allegations are proved false," an article in The Independent warned.

The members of Jackson's composing team I spoke to said the chaos didn't derail their work. "We were never ever told to stop the presses," Grigsby says.

"Nobody ever told us to hold up progress or anything like that," Buxer added. "In fact, there was a lot of pressure from Michael to get this done."

In late summer 1993 -- either immediately before or just after the Chandler allegations emerged, depending on whom you ask -- Jackson's team sent a finished soundtrack to Sega for processing. They weren't the only composers whose tracks ended up in the game, but their contribution was unmistakable. ​"I was really impressed with how much of a signature Michael Jackson sound there was in this, and yet, it was all new," Hector, the ex-Sega exec, remembers. "It clearly had a Michael Jackson sound to it, so that anyone who listened to it would recognize that, gee, that was done by Michael Jackson."

On Feb. 2, 1994, Sega released Sonic 3. Jackson's team was credited, but their boss was not.

Buxer, Grigsby and Jones say Jackson pulled his name from the game — but not his music — because he was disappointed by how different the music sounded on Sega's console when compressed from that "high profile" sound to bleeps and bloops.

"Michael wanted his name taken off the credits if they couldn't get it to sound better," Buxer claimed.

Hector says the deal fell apart because of the molestation allegations, and maintains Jackson's music was pulled from the game. "We had to replace it all," he said. Howard Drossin, a California-based composer, was "tapped" to do the job, Hector said.

Drossin told me he had been under the impression he'd be working with Jackson, not replacing the superstar's work. "At some point either shortly after I was hired, or it was probably the first or second day I was there, and [Roger Hector] mentioned that I was going to work with Michael Jackson," Drossin remembers.

But as the Chandler drama unfolded, Sega management told Drossin, "Jackson was not going to be involved with the project," he says now. "It was just, 'You're going to work with him,' 'You're not going to work with him.' ... I heard some stuff with the news that was going on in the news at the time, and that would probably be a good time reference for you. When all of that stuff broke."

When Drossin finally got his hands on the game, "there was a lot of music already plugged into it," he says. Drossin didn't change much -- and certainly didn't rewrite the whole soundtrack before handing it off to Sega for final processing. When I pointed out some of the similarities between Jackson songs and the Sonic soundtrack, Drossin said "Wow." He seemed genuinely surprised to hear Jackson samples and song structures were in the game -- and insisted he hadn't written them.

Jackson wrote that music. The men who worked with him are certain of it.

"Oh, it did get in the game," Grigsby insisted. "The stuff we handed in, the stuff we did, made it. To. The game."

It's hard to know for sure why Jackson's name wasn't on Sonic 3. My guess is that both the molestation charges and Jackson's concerns about sound quality played a role in his removal from the credits. But Ben Mallison and his fellow Blues are right, Buxer says: The melody that appears in the end credits is also in Jackson's single "Stranger in Moscow." The Sonic song was written before Buxer and Jackson "ever started working on" the single, Buxer said. The chorus hook for "Hard Times," a song Buxer had written for a band he was in, was also repurposed for Sonic, he said. "These cues are all over the Internet," he said. "People have accurately matched the songs to the cues."

A few months after the game came out, Buxer visited Neverland Ranch. Jackson was there, showing off one of the cues to his friends.

This is how Sonic 3 ends.

As Sonic, you float to the last level, where you fight the game's main boss, Doctor Eggman, who flies a kind of armed rocketship. You whack Eggman's ship over and over, aiming for his vulnerable head, until the ship floats offscreen.

But the battle isn't done yet.

Eggman, in this case hilariously mustachioed, returns in a bigger ship with more weapons and a spiked top that makes getting to his head all the more difficult. You whack away some more, and finally, against all odds, the Eggman is defeated and the journey complete.

Sonic, whom you no longer control, celebrates by jumping in the air, spinning into a blue dot.

The credits roll, and Michael Jackson's music plays.

Chris Cadman, author, “Michael Jackson the Maestro”

Part of ‘Carnival Night’ appears to be based on “Jam”.

Azure Lake appears to sample “Black or White”.

The chord progression of “Ice Cap” appears to be based on either “Who Is It” or “Smooth Criminal.”

The Sonic 3 Credits sound like a sped-up version of ‘Stranger In Moscow.’