Meeting the King Of Pop
■ “I get this call from one of Michael Jackson’s people, telling me was Michael’s favourite game and could he come to Sega and meet the people who games and he was thrilled. You could see he was a total Sonic fan – he was really, really excited. So one of our guys says, ‘Why don’t you write the music for the next ?’ And he says, ‘OK.’ Everyone’s jaw dropped. I’m thinking, ‘How are we gonna work this out?’ but basically, he did write the entire score for . I had a CD of it! It was all in the game and we’re just a few weeks away from delivering the final code so it can be produced for Christmas that year and then stories start appearing in the papers about Michael and, you know, him being the bad guy with kids. Everyone panicked. I mean, we had kept it a secret because it was going to be this huge, surprise announcement that Michael was doing the score, then boom, this thing comes out about him. Sega Of Japan made the decision to take [his music] out… I had a composer on my staff, who’d done a bunch of videogame music in the past, called Howard Drossin. I told him he had to replace the audio [for ], basically 16 weeks’ worth of work, in a week and a half. I said we’d slide food under his door but he couldn’t leave the office. And he did it! He was an amazing guy and has gone on to do a lot of movie music in Hollywood but he got his break at STI as a last-minute replacement for Michael Jackson!”
