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  • 'Sonic and the Black Knight' Composer's Contributions Questioned

    All three of Tommy Tallarico's songs put under the spotlight.

    Video game composer Tommy Tallarico's contributions to the Sonic and the Black Knight soundtrack have been put under the microscope this week, as allegations surface that claim works credited to the Video Games Live frontman were originally composed by others within his studio.

    A small group of netizens credited for researching and documenting the work of one Todd Dennis, a composer at Tommy Tallarico Studios, helped bring a demo tape of Dennis' to light that featured music from a 1998 PC game 'Adrenix' - which bears a striking resemblance to Sonic and the Knight's "The Cauldron", a track solely credited to Tallarico in 2009.

    The new discovery was published by Twitter account 'Sonic Music Facts', which itself has chronicled similar familiarities in other tracks from the game that have also been attributed to Tallarico.

    2024-sbk-molten.webp

    After posting comparisons last April regarding 'Molten Mine' and 'Great Megalith' with 1996's Black Dawn (a game whose music credits only mention Todd Dennis), the social media account shared music from 'Adrenix', adding, "This song appeared in one of Todd Dennis' demo reels, confirming that he's responsible for the song. This means that Tommy Tallarico didn't compose ['The Cauldron'] either."

    Tallarico's name is listed as the sole music credit for three songs on the Sonic and the Black Knight soundtrack (with Jun Senoue and the SEGA Sound Team working with the musician on two of these for the arrangement). With the origins of 'The Cauldron' allegedly unveiled, Sonic Music Facts concludes, "with this, we can finally confirm Tommy Tallarico did not compose any of the songs he is credited for on Sonic and the Black Knight."

    The Sonic claims follow the publication of a YouTube video by HBomberguy in 2022 that similarly dissected Tallarico's career in meticulous detail. The musician has not responded to the video, and has generally not been seen in the public space since the failure of his pet project, the Intellivision Amico console.


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    Is it time for the obligatory "his mother is very proud" joke ? Or, does that mean that Todd Dennis is the first american to every work on Sonic ?

    Joke aside, I'm kinda not surprised by that, especially with other account of that being discovered for some Amico games. How he takes credits from his employee is really unacceptable, and I'm kinda sad that there is also of his action on Sonic.

    But eh, he is a good demonstration of the issues of the industries (because even if his personna is the source of a lot of his actions, he is a concentrate of the hype culture of the videogame (more seen in the Amico disaster), boss taking credits from their employees works, etc). I remember seeing a really funny comment on youtube about him, certainly under hbomb's video : "he thought he was the Elon Musk of Videogame Music. Sadly, he was the Elon Musk of Videogame Music".

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    What always gets me is that when the video first came out and I was watching it that part come up and I was understandably caught off guard. I had known Tommy Tallarico as "the guy who made the music for the Virgin/Shiny games," then later as "the annoying guy on Electric Playground" and then later later as "somehow involved with the Amico." I immediately thought that maybe he was saying he helped work on Sonic 2 at STI, since the timestamps sorta lined up with when he was doing work sorta directly for Sega of America anyway and Sonic 2's development was such a famous clusterfuck that who knows. There wasn't any other context that I thought would have happened where it could have made any sense, because that's the only time he could be involved before Buxer or Drossin or Nilsen or even Jackson.

    So when the curtains were raised, and it turns out he was fucking talking about Black Knight of all things, was when the hbomberguy video really got my attention and had me captivated throughout the end of it.

     

     

    Or, put another way:

    image.thumb.png.f0472028792095087877c1ff4b363358.png

     

     

     

    Now people are digging in to see whether he even made the music on the Genesis he claimed to have made (beyond the Joey Kuras Terminator song Hbomberguy mentioned). I already learned from those efforts that Cool Spot, a game that is credited like this:

    image.thumb.png.c5fcceb8fd7dc85f39cbd5596f2a9a9b.png

     

    Has this as its most frequently heard song:

    Which was actually made by someone else, and for a Monopoly game of all things:

     

     

     

     

    If nothing else, we can probably attribute this to him:

     

    Small victories!

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    This is getting off hand Tommy’s  came here like he’s ready to steal it. :0

    Edited by Aroon
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