Jacko's secret sonic soundtrack

Game music has become very lazy over the last couple of years. If you're not shooting prostitutes to the sounds of Since You've Been Gone, you have endure 'exclusive new material' (ie: hopeless songs not fit for a b-side) by never-heard-of-em hip-hop acts. With a few notable exceptions (Katamari, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil), everything reeks of marketing 'synergy' and awful jock-rock.

Back in the days of the Sega Megadrive and the Nintendo Entertainment System, however, games had composers - and they had to be creative. Despite a sonic pallette that consisted of bleeps, pings and sandpapery-synthesized drums, you will still be able to find people who can hum the theme tune to Tetris, Mario or Zelda.

So good were these 16-bit compositions, that they caught the imagination of Michael Jackson. And, it has been revealed, he was comissioned by Sega to write the music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3! Unfortunately, due to Jackson's "issues" with the law in 1994, those contributions were scrapped before the game was published.

However, an amateur documentary on Youtube claims that some of his original work has survived. Take a look:

Okay, so it's more of a news feature than a documentary. And it's full of speculation. And the voice-over has been done by a bored lab assistant.

But it's definitely worth watching, especially for the examples of Sonic 3 music turning up in Jackson's singles. Although I'm sure that most of these songs came out three years before the game - shurely some mistake?!

Insert your own joke about Jackson and fiddling with joysticks here.

Watch the video at Youtube.

Interview with Roger Hector who wrote the replacement soundtrack.

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