So how did Nakamura and Sonic manage to keep outrunning the cease and desist lawsuits? (Really? You copied Prince? What, Disney isn’t litigious enough for you?) Maybe the appropriately gotta go fast double tempo of most of his replays threw off the copyright hounds. More likely was that Sega’s unique sound situation made it tricky to sue.
Instead of straight sampling (i.e., using the actual sound from a song), video games’ limited audio capabilities required artists to “interpolate” the music, where the artist had to reverse engineer the sound and play it themselves. Interpolation IP lawsuits are a lot less slam-dunk than audio sampling ones, especially if they’re brief and use different instruments. And since the Sega Genesis’ tricky sound chip required interpolation not just once but twice, first by Nakamura with a synth on cassette then by whatever poor programmer had to input by ear the tune into the complicated software, the odds of a clean-cut copyright payday were slim indeed.
After Sonic The Hedgehog 2, with no more lands to conquer, Nakamura retired from writing video game music. So for Sonic The Hedgehog 3, Sega decided to just cut out the middleman and hire a composer to steal from himself. That composer: Michael Jackson, whom Sega paid a small fortune just for him to quickly recycle half-finished versions of his upcoming songs and then pretended the collaboration never happened. It wasn’t better than Nakamura’s Sonic, but at least it was faster.
Cedric will never not sing the Bee Gees during the Starlight Zone. You can follow him on Twitter.
Top Image: Sega, Warner Bros. Records
![Disclaimer](<a href="https://rebrand.ly/LazadaSalePh"><img src="http://getfreefollowers.net/images/lazhorizontal.jpeg" /></a>){kind=link}
0 Comments