MJSTUDIO, also known as the Sonic Dream Team, is a fictional American video game developer which produced Sonic Dreams Collection's four unreleased games. The studio's name is a reference to the association between Michael Jackson and Sega, particularly the pop star's involvement with the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise.
Fictional history[]
MJSTUDIO was a game development studio in operation from at least 1996 to 1999. During that period, MJSTUDIO had become an official development partner through Sega of America, and was somehow given extremely early access to development hardware for what would eventually become the Sega Dreamcast. Additionally, the studio acquired a license to work directly with the Sonic the Hedgehog series, planning the development of four highly-ambitious games over the course of the late 1990s.
While they produced significant work on at least one new Sonic game per year, eventually Sega of America discovered one of the game's darker subplots (likely that of Sonic Movie Maker) and cancelled all work with MJSTUDIO. Ultimately, all four of the developer's Sonic games would be left entirely unreleased, remaining as prototypes on the company's former development hardware. However, sometime in 2013, the independent game development group Arcane Kids purchased a Dreamcast development kit off eBay which was found to contain the four MJSTUDIO games in question. Arcane Kids later updated these prototypes for compatibility with modern home computers and compiled them together for a 2015 release as Sonic Dreams Collection.