March 27, 2006 11:14 AM | Simon Carless

Over at the increasingly vital YouTube, there's a new fan-made video exploring Michael Jackson's contribution to the Sonic 3 soundtrack, a concept that at first sounds wacky, but, when confronted with overt musical evidence, notably less so.

The detective work surrounding the video started after an interview with Roger Hector of Sega, in which he revealed: "Sonic 3 (also called Sonic & Knuckles) was a lot of fun, but it was also very difficult. Michael Jackson was originally brought in to compose all the music for the game, but at the very end, his work was dropped after his scandals became public. This caused a lot of problems and required a lot of reworking. But the game turned out great in the end."

Thus, the video, a transcript for which is available on the same forums, and which notes, among other things, that the "...piece of music played at the end of Sonic 3, bears a strong resemblance to the michael jackson song 'Stranger In Moscow'", and that "In the Sonic and Knuckles collection [for PC], some of the music has been replaced... All these tracks in the original Sonic 3 have one thing in common, they all use various "Hey" and "Go" type vocal sounds, which is a trademark of Michael Jackson." Yay, conspiracy theories are plenty of fun, and this one seems on the money.