Claims of Chronicles MIDI Stealing Disputed

By
Tristan Oliver
– January 23, 2009

Another Insider Speaks on TSSZ

It has been a few months since the release of Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood for the Nintendo DS.  Most Sonic faithful have played the game and have since moved on to Sonic Unleashed and hopes for the next major Sonic title.  But there are a few individuals who still have lingering questions about certain elements of Chronicles.  One continued point of debate is the soundtrack–and whether Sega and Bioware ripped fan-produced material for use in the game.

Discussion and debate on the matter was nothing more than a dull roar upon the game’s release, and was only revived recently when an alleged Sega insider going by the nickname Wentos used 4chan to speak about Sonic titles of past, present, and future.  Here’s what he said on Chronicles:

Every single piece of art barring the landscapes were terrible, the cutscenes were made by people who had never touched Flash in their llives and there were a lot of glaring design issues that showed up in the game, ESPECIALLY as you neared the end.  The cliffhanger ending was one of the most rushed scripts I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with.

They actually had a full, originally composed soundtrack but before release they had to pull the hub BGMs out for a variety of (frankly ridiculous) legal reasons.  So they did what anyone else in their position probably would have done; they did a search on the net for whatever Sonic MIDIs they could find and fit them in the game the best they could.  Since the compositions belonged to SEGA in the first place there were no legal issues to be had with what was essentially thieving them, and they could also pan it off as a “soundtrack full of classic Sonic music.”

Which is also why there’s a fairly distinct difference in quality between the electric-guitar intro/battle music and the shit you get while you play the game itself.

To some in the Sonic community these words seemed plausible.  But they didn’t to another industry insider, Kojichan, who commented on our story yesterday.

Kojichan, real name Crystal McNair, works for a casual game company, but she claims to know Graham Scott, one of the designers for Chronicles, through a previous professional relationship as co-workers.  McNair asked Scott whether fan-made MIDIs made it into the soundtrack.  She speaks about that and more in his comments:

I have audio confirmation about the falsity of the Sonic Chronicles stealing Midi’s things.

The Technical Designer at BioWare who developed Sonic Chronicles, his name was Graham Scott.

A Little history about where I work. It’s a Game company called ‘GamesCafe.com’. We make casual games for the older female generation. However, before we went this direction, the company was previously called “Orbital Media”. Graham was one of our designers at Orbital Media, who had worked on some games you might know called “Scurge: Hive”. (A Metroid/Megaman type game), “Juka and the Monophonic Menace”, and “Racing Gears Advance”.

Graham was offered a job at BioWare to take the designer seat for Sonic Chronicles approx 4ish years ago, and accepted, moving himself out to BioWare. He’s still friends with the people who work at my company, and as such, I was able to ask him about the Midi Thefting.

He told me, “That’s the first I’ve heard about that.”–initial response–”The Music guy, Steven Sim, used to work for a small company called FireToad. One of your old Programmers, Chad Sterling, used to work with him.”

Moreover, the other Music director, Richard Jaques (From SEGA Europe), used to compose all his music in Midi format, then export it with SoundTables. He had done such for Sonic R, Sonic 3D Blast, and others. So I’m really sure he wouldn’t have just taken midi’s off the internet, when he could compose his own. XP

And as everyone recently knows, EA bought out BioWare, and in the acquisition, the portable game section may not exist anymore. Graham was talking about how he had to learn the Unreal Engine, and has a sneaking suspicion that because of that, he was going to be forced to make JUST Next-Gen RPG’s for consoles.

In addition to her job at GamesCafe, McNair also is one of the community’s premier artists, and has several of her works up at her website, a division of Neo South Island.

McNair’s detective work puts a dent to the credibility of Wentos’s information, and it only further raises the question as to how accurate Wentos was with his comments.  In light of this new information, what do you think?  So far, our poll results show about a 2 to 1 ratio of respondents who believe Wentos, despite circumstances.  You can comment further in the discussion below.

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