Turns Out, Michael Jackson Composed Music for Sonic 3

Turns Out, Michael Jackson Composed Music for <em>Sonic 3</em>

It’s fair to say that music is an integral part of the gaming experience. Bad music can be ignored and muted easily enough if the game’s still fun, but really excellent music can make the experience blow right past excellence into transcendence. The Super Mario theme music, the Final Fantasy theme music: These are fixtures of pop culture that have seen permutations of the 8/16/32/64-bit varieties, and beyond.

And though there are plenty of Nobuo Uematsus in the industry who can distill sonic alchemy from synthesizers, there’s been a real dearth of partnership between video game creators and actual, you know, bands and artists. (To be fair, though, Xbox 360 has been stepping up its licensing game lately.)

One of the most persistent urban legends about this kind of rarely-glimpsed collaboration was that Michael Jackson was the music composer for the Sega Genesis’ legendary Sonic 3. Allegedly, Jackson was a huge fan of the _Sonic the Hedgehog _ series, and inked a deal with Sega to compose the music for the third installment. Jackson was never paid or credited for this work, leaving an unsolved mystery as indecipherable as the game’s binary code.

But it’s not a rumor any more. The latest issue of Black & White (via Vulture), a French monthly that bills itself as “le magazine official de Michael Jackson,” contains an interview with musician Brad Buxer that all but confirms these rumors. Not only was Buxer credited as the composer of Sonic 3, he played keyboard for Jackson during the King of Pop’s “Dangerous” tour in 1992, so we’re inclined to trust his authority in the area of overlap in this very unique venn diagram.

“I’ve never played the game so I do not know what tracks on which Michael and I have worked the developers have kept,” he told Black & White, “but we did compose music for the game. Michael called me at the time for help on this project, and that’s what I did. And if he is not credited for composing the music, it’s because he was not happy with the 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 his music.”

Buxer also intimated that some of the music Jackson composed was a direct inspiration for the track “Stranger in Moscow” off of the 1995 album HIStory. Jackson’s estate and Sega have yet to confirm or deny Buxer’s statements, so for the time being we can only speculate about the true reach of Jackson’s legacy, be it MP3 or MIDI: