Wacko Jacko Hedgehog Mystery

Blue hedgehog - meet the King of Pop

When Michael Jackson passed away at the end of June I was probably one of the few who immediately, instead of listening to Bad or Thriller, looked out my copy of Sega Mega Collection Plus for the PS2 and reminded myself of what I like to call The Great Wacko Jacko Hedgehog Mystery.

On Thursday, February 24th, 1994, my life was complete when I got home from school to find out that my parents did in fact love me: a brand-spanking new copy of Sonic 3 was sitting on my bedside cabinet. That day was dubbed Sonic Thirdsday, which wasn’t as catchy as Sonic Twosday when the previous game had been released but I applauded the effort.

I was almost 11 years old, and Sonic The Hedgehog was my life. I had the games, the posters, the lunchboxes, the colouring-in books. I even had a t-shirt which stated that the bright blue spiky hero could move at a top speed of 758 miles per hour. Yes, I remember that too.

I wasn’t disappointed with the new Mega Drive game, either. In many cases a third installment can ruin your perception of  everything, because if it looks and feels like the creators have simply cobbled together something to make a fast buck. Sega did no such thing . In fact, because of the sheer size of the game they had to split it in two and tease us for several more months until Sonic & Knuckles was released that October.

Sonic 2 was going to take some beating but despite what the sales figures show, Sonic 3 was a better and literally bigger game. Each level was three times larger than in the previous installment and although there were fewer zones, each one was a sprawling mass of environment, not simply an exercise in left-to-right.

For the first time, Sonic’s foxy friend Tails was a fully playable character so no longer did a second player get frustrated trying to keep up with Sonic, to stay on screen only to die every four seconds. When someone did unfortunately die, there was now the added bonus of probably the coolest move in the game: Sonic could leap towards a flying Tails and grab onto him, giving the two-tailed freak the chance to airlift Sonic high into the sky and into previously inaccessible areas. Trying to control Sonic and Tails at the same time to do tricks was something we all attempted, with mixed results.

Along with Tails, there were three handy new shields that could be employed by Sonic in times of crisis. The lightning, fire, and water shields protected against those three elements and also gave Sonic new attacks: a double-jump with lightning, bouncing jump with water and my personal favourite, the flaming fireball attack.

The regular features of ring-collecting, star post tagging and badnik-bopping were all still around, along with a brand new special stage which gave Sonic the chance to earn one of those elusive Chaos Emeralds.

Unlike Sonic 2′s special stages which were reached through the star posts (going through these with 50 rings gave you a gumball machine bonus stage), giant rings were scattered throughout the levels which, when jumped through, transported young Sonic to a 3-dimensional sphere world. The idea was to collect all the blue spheres whilst avoiding the red ones. Simple, huh? Not quite. Some of the special stages were pretty tricky but a little practice solved everything. I much preferred these special stages to those of the previous games and of course the pay-off was the chance to play as Super Sonic if you were talented enough to gain all seven Emeralds.

The bosses in Sonic 3 were slightly tougher but if you happened to have the relevant shield as you approached, the task ahead could be reduced in difficulty. The aim of the game was to prevent that nasty Dr.Robotnik (known as Eggman now, which I personally think is a disgrace – he’s a doctor dammit!) from snatching the Chaos Emeralds whilst trying to fend off the actions of Knuckles the Echidna, the pink dude who rules the mysterious island onto which Robotnik’s Death Egg crash-landed.

The zones themselves were typical Sonic environments, but this time the creators attempted to ‘link’ them together using cut-scenes instead of Sonic playing through stand-alone zones. There was your standard opening forest-type level (Angel Island Zone), pinball level (Carnival Night Zone) and an underwater level (Hydrocity Zone) although most of the zones have underwater sections so Sonic has a purpose for the water shield.

The most intriguing aspect of the entire game, (perhaps that decade) however, lies with the soundtrack. It wasn’t until around ten years after Sonic 3 was originally released that internet rumours surfaced when several people began to notice similarities between the Sonic 3 score and tracks released by the King of Pop, Michael Jackson.

A simple Youtube search tells you more, but essentially several of the music themes in the game sound an awful lot like Jackson classics. My favourite piece on Sonic 3 happens to be the end credits, which sounds spookily similar to Stranger In Moscow by MJ. Ice Cap Zone’s theme music sounds identical to Who Is It? if you speed it up slightly. And parts of hit Jam can be heard in the Carnival Night Zone.

Even more interesting was the fact that the very same pieces of music that were rumoured to sample Jackson’s work had been conveniently scrapped and replaced by generic themes in later versions of the same game – a major hint that copyright issues were abound.

This all begs the question – if Sega had hired a superstar such as Michael Jackson to compose music for the biggest computer game of the time, why didn’t anyone know about it?

After some investigation, it’s very difficult to tell how much, if at all, Jackson was involved. Jacko spent a lot of time around Sega’s American offices during and after the success of the game version of Moonwalker. He was known to be a huge Sonic fan (I don’t blame him!) and it’s rumoured that Sega asked him to write for Sonic 3.

From 2003 until 2005, several major sources involved with the game happily told interviewers that Jackson did indeed write an entire score for the game, which had to be quietly dropped when Jackson was accused in November 1993 of molesting a 13 year old. The head of Sega Technical Institute, Roger Hector, supposedly took the only tape of the MJ score and handed it to the legal department of Sega Of Japan.

There’s a strong case that Michael Jackson worked on Sonic 3 not just because of the similarities in the songs, but also in the game credits. Both Geoff Grace and Brad Buxor arranged music for Jackson in the past, and Bobby Brooks sequenced synthesizers and drums on 1997’s Blood on the Dance Floor and mixed HIStory. It has been claimed that a producer in the credits known as Cirocco has all of the tracks in his possession on a demo tape but wouldn’t be able to release such a thing without permission.

In 2008 however, Roger Hector changed his tune and would now only confirm that Jackson came in to Sega once or twice to say hi. He said anything else would now be classed as unconfirmed rumour. Along with this, several other prominent members of the Sega team at the time now say that nothing ever came from Jackson’s visits; the Sega Of America President being one of the those people. It is now generally perceived that Jacko did try out a few things with Hector, but it did not go any further and didn’t even get to the stage where Hector discussed the possibility with Sega executives and management. It could easily be that Sonic 3’s score was simply influenced by Jackson’s work; many other computer games have done exactly the same thing.

Perhaps now that Jackson has passed away, the Sonic Geeks out there will finally get their answers. Did Jackson really perform some secret tracks only to be replaced due to unfortunate circumstances? Or were the themes used in the game simply a tribute to the King Of Pop? Whatever the case may be, Sonic 3 is still a classic whose score is up there with the all-time computer console greats. But until cast iron confirmation arises from all the shrouds of secrecy, we may never know how much Michael Jackson had a hand in the Sonic The Hedgehog legacy.