I Will Never Forget the Caverns Music from Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure for Sega Genesis

I had a Sega Genesis growing up rather than a Super NES. While that means I initially missed out on game-changers like Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World, EarthBound, and Final Fantasy VI, it does mean I got to enjoy Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure. If you think I’m making a joke here, then you obviously haven’t played Buster’s Hidden Treasure.

Buster’s Hidden Treasure is one of my favorite Genesis games to this day. I’ve never actually owned it, but whenever I had a couple dollars saved up, I would ride my bike to the local video rental place and pick up this game for however long they’d let me keep it. It’s an absolutely fantastic platformer, obviously based on the hit cartoon series from the early 1990s. It plays really well and has a surprisingly beefy amount of content (which was actually somewhat rare for Genesis games). Its overworld map included alternate routes and secret stages, sort of like Super Mario Bros. 3. But best of all, the soundtrack was absolutely killer.

My favorite piece of music in the entire game is the song for the Caverns stage. Here it is:

It starts off as an eerie remix of the cartoon’s theme song (a lot of tracks in this game are remixed versions of the Tiny Toon Adventures TV series’ main theme song), but then it goes off in all sorts of different directions. It uses bendy, eerie synthesizers, but then branches off into some dark ragtime riffs that are pretty fantastic.

In fact, it reminds me just a little teensy bit of the Ghosts ‘n Goblins theme song, which is another great piece of retro gaming music.

And seriously, whenever I think of Tiny Toon Adventures, it’s the Caverns music that instantly comes into my head, before the actual cartoon theme song. This is a ditty with some serious staying power. It’s not quite as weird as the “Crackin’ the Gate of the Mojo Mansion” song from Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow, but I love it all the same.