4 out of 5

Label: Limited Run Games, Nickelodeon

Produced by: ?

Bias alert: Hyperstone Heist was my Turtles game. Yeah, the love was there beforehand, and I played the classic NES game at friends’ houses, and got to see the arcade version at the bowling alley or whatnot, but we were a Genesis house, I was a TMNT child, and Hyperstone was my jam. Even taking a half-nostalgia step back, Genesis was my jam, giving me rose-graced ears for that crunchy sound chip, with its grating low-end that I never recognized as such growing up. To me – it just sounds right. It sounds cool. Take that background and gift it to Konami Kukeiha Club for a soundtrack, and while it maybe uncoincidentally results in one of my favorite 4-bit / 8-bit / 16-bit Turtles’ game score – and there are many!! – I do sincerely think the uniqueness of the Genesis effects, and similarly unique vibe of the game – the nature of the Genesis’ colors and sprites tends to give their games a slightly “meaner” feel – encouraged a somewhat unique score in comparison to those many others, including the SNES version of this same game.

Very generally speaking, KKC is uniformly excellent at crafting these things, but they tend to wander between memorability and background, depending on the project. I’m sure that has something to do with which composers were rotated in at whichever point (this is me assuming that’s how it worked), but also it can be inevitable with timelines and the property as well, as some games are more generic than others, or maybe had more / less memory constraints, more / less runway for writing, etc. But the uniformity is that the quality is always there, it’s just a gamble whether or not that amounts to an ear worm. Specific to the Turtles franchise, it’s a further juggle between a kind of stereotypical KKC speedrun of bleeps and vague TMNT themes that are taken from / inspired by the Fred Wolf cartoon. Some things end up “sounding” like the Turtles, surely owing to cues from that show. So: how much KKC leans towards their sound, or just repeats Turtles tunes of the past, is where a balance should be struck – one which I think Hyperstone Heist does crazily well. And in my nonsense theorizing, that might be because of the specifics of the Genesis, which grounds a lot of these tracks in “heavier” melodies, with the gravelly digitized voices dotted in on some songs / beats a fun extra punch. It all feels very 90s; very rad with distorted guitar and precursor Go Ninja Go vibes.

While the vinyl pressing on this sounds good (which wasn’t the case with my Turtles in Time copy), we still run into a problem that I guess is part and parcel with porting old scores to whichever medium – tracks that cut off suddenly. At some point, I should get a better understanding of how these things are arranged for vinyl, or cassette, or etc., but it there’s generally room to play around with looping or fades to make for a more seamless listening experience; though I also acknowledge that might knock some “purist” ethic about presenting the tracks as-is. But again, I have no idea what the process is in getting these songs to, in this case, vinyl. As part of this, sequencing can get funky, as “High Score” is perhaps the last track in the game’s playlist, but isn’t nearly as good of an album ender as one of the Credits tracks.

All around, though, one of the tops of the massive pile of TMNT scores, expanding beyond the (9?) that were rereleased by Limited Run and a few others between 2024 and 2025.