Limited Run's Chex Quest Chex Warrior Edition was worth the wait
Posted on Feb 24, 2021
We. Love. Chex Quest. It’s one of the best games of all time. It’s certainly the best Doom game of all time. AND it came with a free box of cereal - you can’t beat that for a bargain! In the classic shooter community, Chex Quest has always had a tiny but dedicated core of fans who have clamored for years for more cereal-based shooter content.
Limited Run is a company of game merchandise makers that, by no small coincidence, caters to small fandoms by making fun feely packs with trinkets and shirts and fun things like that. And wow, they made a CHEX QUEST BOX! Real Chex Quest merch for real Chex Quest fans! It was an instant buy, even if it cost 150 dollars. And so, in April of 2020, we placed our order the second we saw it. It was our little quarantine gift to ourselves. It would be worth it.
And so we waited. And waited. Just like how we were waiting for quarantine to end.
Our order did not arrive until January of 2021. Nine months later. We know it was a pre-order, we know there was a Dang Pandemic on, but oh man, that’s a long time to wait. We were almost at the point of giving up completely on this ever arriving when we finally got the notification it had shipped. Now it’s here, and has cemented us as Real Chex Quest fans. So why not go over it, and take a look at everything that came in it?
The Box
The first thing to mention is the box that it came in, because wow, what a box! When we saw the art for this, we expected everything to come packed into something roughly the size of a box of cereal - this is way bigger! It doesn’t even open like a cereal box, it slides open like a nice iPhone box or something. It’s even fully holographic. This box alone is something that you could put on your shelf with pride.
T-shirt
Once you’ve got the lid off, the very first thing you see is a fun little t-shirt with this adorable image of a Flemoid getting zorched on it! Unfortunately for us, this shirt is too small for us to wear. That’s fine, though - we’re seriously considering getting an embroidery hoop and turning it into a wall display piece.
The printing on the shirt is pretty regular printing, the cheap kind that will definitely crack into pieces if you wear and wash it regularly. We’d hate to see this to get ruined over time, it’s so cute.
The lithograph & poster
Also on top are the lithograph and the reversible poster. The lithograph is nothing special, it’s just another fancy word for a printed image, like “Giclée”. But it’s a nice printed image of the early concept art of the game. Check out that funky earwax-yellow Flemoid!
The poster is really nice, though. Shame it was way too big to take a decent photo of. On the front, you’ve got this pretty decent art of Fred Chexter doing his thing, zorching Flemoids, the usual - but on the back is a massive print of the Chex Quest 2 ending image! I will be seeing you at www.chexquest.com, Fred! No offense to the artist of the very nice front, but I have no idea why you wouldn’t want the Chex Warrior himself beatifically smiling upon you every hour of the day. I’m going to hang this one right on the ceiling above my bed so I can wake up filled with the determination only Fred Chexter himself could provide.
Inside the box - top half
The “floppy disk” is actually a USB stick with a copy of the original Chex Quest on it. We couldn’t figure out how to open it at all. We poked, we pried, and we tugged at the little bit we assumed had the USB in it… Nothing. Totally stuck. Which is fine, because we already have a copy of Chex Quest, but we’d like to open it someday, you know?
There is also a CD copy of the game. We don’t own a CD drive. That’s kind of crazy, isn’t it? Ten or so years ago saying you didn’t have a computer with a CD drive would’ve been lunacy. Now it’s normal. How fascinating, the way things change. But this disk is going to stay shrink-wrapped forever.
And, yep! Stickers! We got the Chex Quest logo and we got the logo of the Intergalactic Federation of Cereals. You can stick these on your laptop, stick these on the back of a stop sign, stick these on your forehead. You can stick these just about anywhere. They’re holographic, too, so that’s soooo fun.
Inside the box - bottom half
NOW we’re talking! We thought the ‘Chex Warrior statue’ was going to be a tiny (like, one inch tall) statue made out of plastic, but it is solid metal and three inches tall. It’s really, really cool. You can set this guy on your desk, and he’ll be all, “Fuck you, Flemoids!” But he won’t say that because he’s made of pewter or some other cheap metal. It’s still really nice, though. If you have some paints left over from your Warhammer hobby you tried to pick up, why not paint him? Make your own custom Chex Warrior. How about a Muddy Buddies-themed Chex Warrior, for winter combat? That is a cool idea.
And you get a COIN! This is a nice big heavy coin, about 1¾th of an inch in diameter, made from some heavy-but-cheap metal like brass or something. The coin is the perfect thing to make life altering decisions with. On the “heads” side is the logo of the Intergalactic Federation of Cereals just like the sticker, and the “tails” has the plain Chex Quest logo.
And pins, too! People love enamel pins. You can pin them on your laptop, the back of a stop sign, on your forehead, just about anywhere. We got one in the shape of the Chex Warrior armor and one that’s a classic Flemoid. Naturally we are biased towards the Flemoid one, but the tiny armless and legless Chex Warrior is hilarious.
There’s also a little keychain of a Chex piece. We thought this was going to be hard plastic from the images but it is actually soft rubber. It is a keychain. You can put your keys on it.
That is all we have to say about the keychain.
Zorcher replica
Click here to animate
This is the centerpiece. This is the reason we bought this thing. It’s a real zorcher. A genuine zorcher toy! Can you even believe it! It’s everything we would have wanted! It’s like getting the shotgun toy the Doom shotgun was based off of! It’s perfect! It’s life size! It’s real! OUR OWN ZORCHER!!!
It’s cheaply made, though. The plastic is very clearly covered in injection-molding seam marks, and the button in the middle is wobbly and loose in its socket. But look at it this way: we didn’t even expect it would light up and make noise! We thought it was just going to be a replica shelf-sitter, but this is an actual ZORCHER TOY. You can run around like a little kid and pretend to zorch Flemoids with the best of them! Oh man, it’s so cool. We love this. We love it so much. It is now our heirloom treasure.
Overall
So, was this worth the over $150 and nearly a year of waiting? In a word, yes! We love this kit! Sure, if you’re not a Chex Quest superfan like us you’re not going to be super interested, but we loooooove Chex Quest. It really should be evident that we love it enough to drop nearly $170 after taxes and shipping on something like this. It’s not the perfect pack, though - we would’ve loved the zorcher toy to have better molding - but it’s very, very, VERY good as a bunch of pointless tacky junk to warm a shelf. We couldn’t be happier. Keep ‘em zorching, friends!
Tagged: 1996 2020 advergaming chex quest limited run merchandise t-shirts
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