Bite-Sized Game History: Michael Jackson’s Music for Sonic 3, Maximo’s 20th Anniversary, and Naughty Dog’s First Logo

The joyous sights and sounds of San Diego Comic-Con are still in the air, so now’s a great time to reminisce about another round of the secret origins behind some of your favorite games.

In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, we’ll explore the team-up you always suspected from Sonic the Hedgehog 3, as well as a few early sketches from Maximo: Ghosts To Glory, and the animated antics of the very first Naughty Dog.

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

It’s fair to say that the fandom surrounding Sonic the Hedgehog is intense even on a normal day, but the fervor surrounding Michael Jackson’s possible connection to the franchise is something else entirely. The King of Pop was an avowed fan of the Blue Blur in the early 1990s, and many fans believe that he leveraged his previous working relationship with Sega into a spot on the development team for Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Though it would officially remain a rumor for more than 30 years as Jackson wasn’t credited in the final game.

In spite of Jackson’s erasure from the credits, the rumor has long been accepted as the truth by Sonic fans, and it’s not altogether hard to believe. A lot of the music from Sonic 3 sounds like it would be right at home on Dangerous or HIStory, and many of Jackson’s frequent collaborators (including Brad Buxer, Doug Grigsby III, and Cirocco Jones) did work on the soundtrack.

A further wrinkle recently arose after the release of Sega’s most-recent Sonic compilation, Sonic Origins, which includes different music for Sonic 3. This caused considerable confusion for Yuji Naka, one of the co-creators of Sonic, who just casually confirmed that Jackson did indeed work on the soundtrack for Sonic 3…

In a separate tweet, Naka even shared a picture of Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, taken from a helicopter when he flew out to meet with the musician.

Maximo: Ghosts To Glory, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, doesn’t have quite the same behind-the-scenes intrigue as Sonic 3. In fact, the game’s development team will often talk about how great the development process was. That includes Scott Rogers, who recently shared a team photograph and a handful of concept sketches of the Ghosts N Goblins spinoff:

Finally, let’s go all the way back to the late 1980s, to a time when “party animals” were all the rage as brand mascots. Budweiser had Spuds MacKenzie, Camel had Joe Camel, and Domino’s had whatever the heck a Noid is, though controversy would cut down each of these mascots in their prime. Fledgling game development studio Naughty Dog jumped on the trend after their name change from JAM Software, and they introduced their very own Nawty Dog in 1989.

Naughty Dog’s cool canine was designed and illustrated by co-founder Jason Rubin, and it exists somewhere between a blatant ripoff and an affectionate parody of old Spuds himself, including a pair of oversized shades, an irreverent smirk, and a bottomless appetite for alcohol:

That’s it for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History. I’m always on the lookout for tiny historical tidbits such as these, so be sure to follow me on Twitter at @VideoGameCanon if you’d like to see more.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.