Years of speculation around the king of pop’s contribution to Sonic 3 culminate in an errant tweet about Sonic Origins

For decades, Michael Jackson’s involvement in the music of Sonic 3 has been something of an open secret. Whispers that Jackson had made music for the project have whirled around since the mid-oughts. However Sega has been notoriously hush hush on the situation. Those close to the project have said that they’re not allowed to discuss Jackson’s involvement.
That was, of course, until today when lead programmer for the original Sega Genesis Sonic games casually tweeted about Sega Official using Jackson’s music. This was in response to finding out that Sonic 3 has different music for its re-release in Sonic Origins.
A separate follow-up tweet by Naka shows a faded picture of fields that he took “when we went to his house in his helicopter”. Given the lack of any other context, we can only assume that he means MJ’s house and helicopter.
However, this isn’t the first time Jackson’s involvement in Sonic 3 has been directly mentioned. In an interview from the Abbey Road Institute composer Brad Buxer, who worked with Jackson, describes how Sega contracted MJ to do the cues. Buxer says that MJ agreed, but that the king of pop only worked on one cue. The rest, Buxer did himself.
‘Cause, the way Michael works is, he’ll tell Sega he’ll do it, and then he says, ‘Brad, you do it’, right? So, I think we did one cue together with Michael. One. And the rest, I had to do it myself.
Brad Buxer, talking with Abbey Road Institue Paris
So, there we have it. Years of speculation and grasping to anyone potentially alluding to the project terminated by the lead programmer himself casually tweeting about Jackson’s involvement.
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