 With the release of Sonic Origins, Sega has finally re-released Sonic 3 and Knuckles for the first time since 2011. Well, most of the game has been re-released. Several music tracks have been replaced due to some behind the scenes licensing issues that nobody at Sega is particularly interested in discussing. With a lack of an official explanation, fans are eager to speculate about the missing music tracks, especially as this ties into one of the biggest urban legends in the history of gaming. The question of whether the king of pop, Michael Jackson, composed music for Sonic 3. When the game first released in 1993, fans quickly recognised that a few of the tracks bore a striking resemblance to the work of Michael Jackson. Once rumours began to spread that Jackson's music was in Sonic 3, heroic fans started taking every possible opportunity to bother every single person involved with the game by asking them about the music. To this day, we still do not know everything about what happened. There are likely more mysteries to be uncovered and this video probably won't stay accurate for very long, but now, at the time of the release of Sonic Origins, here is the best possible explanation for Michael Jackson's involvement with Sonic 3 and why his music was removed from Sonic Origins. Michael Jackson was an enormous Sonic the Hedgehog fan. He loved games in general, but he was particularly fond of Sonic. Having worked with Sega on a Mega Drive tie-in game for his movie Moonwalker, he asked to meet the development team who were working on Sonic 3. During the meeting, someone suggested that Jackson could compose music for Sonic 3 and he leapt at the chance. Hiring Michael Jackson, though, doesn't just mean hiring one man. The king of pop quickly put together his songwriting team, a group of musicians that he worked with regularly on his albums. This team included at least six men, Brad Buxer, Bobby Brooks, Doug Grigsby III, Daryl Ross, Jeff Grace, and Soroko Jones, who all came together with Jackson for early ideas sessions. Said Buxer, I was working with Michael on the dangerous album 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. According to sound engineer Matt Forger, none of us involved in this were really gamers. 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 video games in general, but Michael really is the core. The process wasn't as we would normally construct songs for an album or another project of Michael's. 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. Comments from Jackson's team suggest that he was only heavily involved in the early stages of the music's production. As he didn't actually play any instruments to a high standard, his contribution didn't go beyond these beatboxing sessions, and he relied on his team to complete the work. This doesn't mean that he didn't have an impact on the overall sound of the album. He had an incredible talent for communicating musical sounds simply using his own voice. Sound engineer Rob Hoffman described how Jackson composed an entire piece of music in his head for another, non-psych piece of music without using instruments. He said, One morning MJ came in with a new song he had written overnight. We called in a guitar player, and Michael sang every note of every chord to him. Here's the first chord, first note, second note, third note. Here's the second chord, first note, second note, third note, etc etc. We then witnessed him giving the most heartfelt and profound vocal performance live in the control room through an SM57. He would sing us an entire string arrangement every part. Composer Steve Boccaro once told me he witnessed MJ doing that with the string section in the room, had it all in his head, harmony and everything, not just little eight-bar loop ideas. He would actually sing the entire arrangement into a micro cassette recorder complete with stops and fills. Thus, after Jackson's initial involvement, he handed over the main bulk of the work, the job of actually turning these beatboxing tapes into synthesized music, to Brad Buxer. Buxer said, The way Michael works is that he tells Saga that he'll do it, and he says Brad, you do it. I think we did one song with Michael together. One. The rest I had to do myself. For Icecap's own, Buxer adapted an unreleased song from his band, The Jetsons, titled Hard Times, which sounds like a Michael Jackson song purely because Buxer was so involved with Jackson's music. In other arrangements, Buxer was faithful to Jackson's beatboxing, going so far as to sample some of his signature sounds. Although it is unclear whether these particular samples made it into the final game, said Buxer. We did use a lot of samples made from Jackson's beatboxing. We would chop this up and use it in cues. Of course, there were Michael here, here, and other signature Michaelisms. In at least one case, Sonic 3 Music actually inspired another song on one of Jackson's later albums. Buxer explains. The writing process was sometimes he'd have an idea in his head. Sometimes he would have half an idea in his head. Sometimes he would have nothing. Like with Stranger and Moscow. We were in Moscow performing, and he calls me at 10.30 in the morning. I'd go knock on his door, and I had a cassette player. I'd been doing all the Saga Sonic the Hedgehog cues. I said, I'm sure you want to hear the Sonic the Hedgehog music. And I came up with the chorus on the spot, and he fell in love with it. So in an hour and a half, Stranger and Moscow was written. Despite his involvement in the Sonic 3's score, Jackson is not credited in the finished game. Saga executives and Jackson's music team disagree on the specific reason for this. According to Buxer, Jackson became frustrated with the sound that was produced by the Sega Mega Drive sound chip, believing that it wasn't up to the standard that he wanted to be associated with. Michael wanted his name taken off the credits if they couldn't get it to sound better, said Buxer. For this reason, Buxer argues, Jackson's name was removed from the game, while the remaining members of his music team are all credited. Sega Technical Institute Executive Roger Hector cites a different explanation, and insists that all of Jackson's music was removed from the final game. According to Hector, the music was removed following abuse allegations that were levied against Michael, creating a large scandal in the summer of 1993, just a few months before Sonic 3 debuted. Said Hector, When the first scandal started breaking about Michael Jackson, it was taken pretty seriously at Sega, and the decision was really made in Japan that Michael Jackson's music had to be pulled, and so I got the call. We agreed we had to go ahead and do that. Once the decision had been made to pull Michael Jackson's music from the game, we had to kind of scramble to try and replace the whole musical soundtrack, and we had Howard Drossin at STI composing new music. We also had a couple of other composers from Sega of Japan who were contributing, and it was all being somewhat edited and pulled together by Yuji Naka, who was the head of the team. He's really the final authority on what made it into the game. I would never say unequivocally that there was no similarity between any music Michael Jackson created and what would ultimately end up in the game, but I can say that if that occurred, it certainly wasn't by design or by any intent on the part of Sega. Howard Drossin disagrees with this account. He told The Huffington Post that when he was given the game, there was a lot of music already plugged into it, and he did not change very much of this. He definitely didn't recompose all of the music for the game in the space of a few months. Doug Grigsby III, a member of Jackson's team, insists that his contributions were not removed. He said, oh, it did get in the game. The stuff we handed in, the stuff we did, made it. Took the game. So, did Michael Jackson compose music for Sonic 3? Yes, he did. Did he compose a lot of it? Probably not. He was working with a large team of musicians, and it's impossible to isolate the contributions of any one musician within this mix. The next question is, why did this music get removed from Sonic Origins? As with the specifics of Michael Jackson's involvement, there is a lot of speculation about this subject online, with rumours suggesting that there are issues relating to either the royalties or to the intellectual property rights for the songs that have been removed. Certainly, with so many composers involved with Sonic 3's music, if there were issues surrounding rights or royalties, they could potentially be complicated. It's probably unwise to cast blame on any one person or group of people as the issues could be related to any number of the musicians who worked on the game, or none at all. For all that these various musical contributions might make attribution messy, one thing is certain. The original Sonic 3 soundtrack is a fantastic piece of musical art. The moral of the story is that cooperation is a beautiful thing. When a group of talented people cooperate together, they can make something that surpasses what any one person can achieve. And if a group of people can't agree to a compromise, it makes life difficult for absolutely everyone involved.