Edited by Caitlin Corsetti

“Forever Physical” has been Josh Fairhurst’s collecting mentality long before he founded Limited Run Games back in 2015. Fairhurst is a lifelong fan and collector of all things games. He has been actively collecting sealed games since 2007, motivated by the availability of sealed copies of historically important games. Whenever he came across cheaper copies in retail stores, he’d always go out of his way to grab copies of games that he connected most with and had notoriety in the collecting community. He described this approach as “no filter” collecting, where little was off limits when the long-term plan was simply to put the games in storage.

Fairhurst saw sealed games an opportunity to help his family financially, as he viewed the games as investment opportunities in a category of collectibles that he understood well. He remembers the collecting community’s reaction to a February 2008 eBay auction, where a sealed copy of Chrono Trigger for the Super Nintendo sold for $1,217—a shocking sum at the time for a 13-year-old game. This sale motivated Fairhurst to pursue copies of similarly beloved games with hopes of creating his own cache of valuable titles.

But where to start? For Fairhurst, any game that had a cultural impact was on the table. He picked up multiple copies of Pokémon Platinum and The Last of Us for as little as $10 on clearance, recognizing that they were simply too cheap for the acclaim they held as “pop culture iconic pieces.”

One of his most memorable purchases of this era was a sealed copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask for only $30. He acquired 10 copies of Minecraft for the Xbox 360 due to the game’s meteoric success. Ironically, he passed up many copies of Chrono Trigger’s Nintendo DS release, which has also meaningfully appreciated since it went out of production. 

As Fairhurst’s life evolved in the 2010s, hunting retail stores for closeout deals wasn’t realistic anymore. With his founding of both Mighty Rabbit Studios and Limited Run Games, his time was scarce. But his positions increased access and connections, leading him to acquire several large collections.

In 2016, he was offered his first collection—roughly 70 PlayStation “long box” games. Regretfully, he passed.

It wasn’t until 2020 when the next opportunity appeared. In both 2020 and 2023 he received direct offers for large collections from former Sony employees. Sony had a long-time practice of giving certain employees sealed copies of all games released for their consoles—not just first-party published games. Many employees opened and played their copies, while others kept theirs sealed and stored away.

For the 2020 collection, the haul of PlayStation games was so large it occupied an entire bay of a home garage. It was time for the games to go. Careful to not miss out like he had in 2016, Fairhurst made strong offers based on the information available to him for both the 2020 and 2023 collections. These purchases were both somewhat blind, as given the quantity of games included, there weren’t itemized lists of titles or which games were sealed versus CIB status. And that doesn’t even factor in the condition of the items. It was a gamble, and it paid off.

The vast majority of both collections were sealed and in good condition. Fairhurst showcased these purchases on social media and among his sealed collecting groups—he was met with tremendous interest in these collections. But he wasn’t in a rush to move these games and his plan remained the same—hold on to them until it made sense to do something else.

A collector reached out in 2020 and Fairhurst sold a handful of games from the first collection to help pay for the remainder of the collection’s purchase price. He also bought an Initial D arcade machine to celebrate the sale. Some of the games he offloaded were eventually graded by WATA and sold at auction in the coming years, ultimately selling for more than 10 times what Fairhurst sold them for.

He was aware of grading since the late 2000s, but the impact grading had on the sale price was a huge surprise. For future collections, Fairhurst vowed not to sell any more games prior to grading the collection himself—thus, The Apex Collection was born in 2024 through WATA Games. 

For the Limited Run Games games included in The Apex Collection, Fairhurst made a deliberate effort to only grade games which help tell the history of the company. These games range from titles developed by Mighty Rabbit Studios, such as Breach & Clear (Limited Run Games Vita #1, their first-ever title printed) and Saturday Morning RPG. There are many notable third-party examples as well, such as Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty!, which kicked off the snowball of Limited Run dominating run as an independent distributor.

Another key title was Shadow Complex Remastered. Fairhurst really wanted a physical copy of Shadow Complex, a digital Xbox Live Arcade game, but there was no hope of it existing without Limited Run’s involvement. So they made it happen in collaboration with Epic Games and released physical copies of the remastered game. The infamous cult classic Night Trap found an entirely new audience across multiple platforms through Limited Run and is also represented here. Polygon’s 2016 Game of the Year Firewatch was the first example of a Limited Run-published game that included something unique inside the packaging—a replica of the in-game map used by the main character. Limited Run has become renowned for their sprawling collectors editions which pay great homage to the games.

There are also a number of extremely unique Limited Run Games titles within The Apex Collection:

The Apex Collection was named after Fairhurst and Limited Run Games’ home city of Apex, North Carolina. This elite city name offered an excellent opportunity to signify both the home of his collection while recognizing the sheer magnitude of pedigree, which is WATA’s largest ever pedigree to-date with more than 1,300 games.