You better be quiet or he'll send his legions of Thriller Zombies to touch you in inappropriate places while you sleep.

For those interested, the non-tubed original, hi-res video is up at the sonic cult.

http://www.sonic-cult.org/dispart.ph...bid=3&artid=16

hopefully some of the people who worked on the game can be contacted soon for addittional info, as this MJ thing is pretty much speculation so far.

Wow now that's funny! :lol:

I always thought that some tracks could have been composed by Michael Jackson (especially Launch Base) and it seems they have really been composed by him. Anyway, It doesnt change the fact that all the Sonic The Hedgehog soundtracks rocked at their time.

:edgarrock:

i think the reason they switched the music for ice cap, launch base, carnival night, and the 1st boss theme (which they left off for the video) for the pc version was that all of those songs used some weird samples or sounds from the fm synth that midi couldn't properly reproduce.

boss song: most of this is samples. it would sound terrible as midi.
ice cap: wouldn't sound too bad, but the kick drum would sound really weak, and there would be no samples during the song otherwise.
launch base: the "whistle" effect they have going with the squares would sound worse, and again, no samples.
carnival night: lots of samples - kick drum, a lot of snares, and the music sounded shitty to me anyway, so i'm glad they changed it (same with the boss, really).

they also changed the music for the competition menu and the credits, which wouldn't have been too hard to change to midi. it's possible that jackson directly worked on this game, but i'd guess that his people did, not him directly.

by the way, the replacements for ice cap and launch base 2 aren't nearly as good as the originals (launch base 1 is pretty decent, and anything is better than the original carnival night to me). they replaced the sonic 3 stage 1 boss theme with the one from sonic and knuckles, which, to me, is an improvement too!

All of the tracks were proven to be possible to do in MIDI. It would've needed heavy editing put its possible.

That would be work, though, and no company in existence has ever put work into a port.

Jokes aside, I don't understand why rather than port a song, they would compose an entirely new one.

Also, couldn't they have just omitted the samples and kept the original compositions otherwise intact?

Odds are, it was faster and cheaper to just replace the tracks. The two likeliest scenarios are that it was decided it would take the resequencer too long to fix the tracks, so they got a composer to quickly hammer out a few tracks for them. Or, it proved cheaper to bring in a composer than it would be to bring on someone with the expertise to fix the busted MIDIs.

There's a good chance the port was done with just a handful of programmers and a FM-to-MIDI program, since companies don't allocate a whole lot of resources to these projects, and they didn't even have someone knowledgable about the MIDI format on hand.

It's interesting to note that the PC version of S&K Collection had a screensaver which had every music track from the Megadrive games - but the original Icecap, Carnival, etc (the levels they midi'd up) megadrive tunes were not present.

i'm not saying that replacing them with midi would have been impossible... i'm just saying that it wouldn't have sounded as close as the other songs. the kick sample in ice cap would be reduced to a weak kick in midi, and the boss song would be almost entirely gone :)

Michael did alright in this work. Carnival Night Zone's music was about the biggest Sonic music hit.

I've always enjoyed the ending Credits for Sonic 3 and now I know why.

Saaayga! HeeHee!
 

well I think this thread may be coming to close, if so then here's something to put the final nail in the coffin,the tune to go with the scandal!

http://machinesmith.googlepages.com/home

yeah yeah I know, `clean-up' was not on the list of things to do with it but it's a start! Whaddaya think?

Cool remix.

Very interesting theory indeed. I'm no musician, so I really don't know what all this chord progression stuff is about, but I do want to point something out that sort of throws a shoe at this theory.

If the tracks in question were removed in the release for the PC for "legal reasons," how come they aren't removed in the Sonic Mega Collection for Gamecube?

Well, obviously, it must be because of technical reasons, because when I load Mega Collection, it says "Compiled under the supervision of Sonic Team." If there were legal reasons for the removal of the tracks for the PC version, you'd think they'd still apply to the Gamecube release and those tracks would be removed.

That was fairly interesting. The similarities are very probable. Pretty cool. :)

Thanks Joe, as to the whole `Mega collection' stance I'm of the opinion that while Sonic for the pc was ported from its original form (i.e. Genesis/MegaDrive ROM cart thing had to be taken apart and reassembled for the PC) the console version benefitted from a `console specific emulator' (I use the term loosely) that ran the actual ROM images (Nintendo/Sony etc just paid to have the rights to bundle the image on their discs)

So technically you have the original cartridge on disc, and theres no need to re-issues liscenses (from musicians and what have you) to re-produce the material

the original forum where this whole thing was documented discusses this whole issue in detail, check it: http://www.sws2b.com/forums/index.ph...0jackson&st=30

on a seperate note: I'm banned? What'd I do? Is this coz of the track I'll clean it up man! honest!

You're not banned. It's April Fools today; lots of crazy stuff going on here.

Also, thanks for that remix. It's well done.