Michael Jackson’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Involvement Confirmed

“Urban legend” no longer describes the belief that Michael Jackson worked on Sonic the Hedgehog 3′s soundtrack. This is one of the games industry’s greatest rumors, and now one of Michael Jackson’s composers has confirmed it as fact. Brad Buxor, who wrote tunes with MJ, told French Michael Jackson magazine Black & White (yes, apparently it exists) that the reports are true:

I’ve never played the game so I do not know what tracks on which Michael and I have worked the developers have kept, 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 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 his music…

Buxor then says that the chords for Stranger in Moscow were based on music for the game (in this case the Staff Roll). For more about this crazy saga, check out Sega-16′s exhaustive investigation from May 2009 which at the time noted that despite any evidence, “nothing is ever actually confirmed by anyone outside of the game’s development team, an information void centered squarely around the higher ups who had the power to approve or deny everything that went into it.” That’s not the case anymore, as Buxor was an outside composer, and he’s listed in the game’s credits. [VGMDB.net via Original Sound Version]