Kinniku Banzuke (“Muscle Ranking”) was a TV show – the predecessor to Sasuke (A.K.A. Ninja Warrior) – that pitted Japanese athletes against each other in a variety of creative physical challenges. When Konami secured the license to make video games based on the show, they honored their tradition of Moais by putting one in as an extremely well-hidden easter egg: Should one clear a jump of height 20 in the “Monster Box” mode, a special mode is unlocked, tasking the player with jumping over a variety of objects, steadily growing in size, the last of which is a 3 meters and 76 centimeters tall Moai. It’s impossible to progress very far in this special mode without Kaneda – the character with the highest stats – who thus needs to be unlocked first, by getting a perfect score in any other special mode. Even after those ordeals, the reality turns out to be a distressing one: In practice, it isn’t humanly possible to reach the Moai (let alone jump over it), as the stage before it requires three frame-perfect inputs in a row, and missing it twice in a row sends the player back to the very first level. This Moai was likely seen by anyone for the first time in a 2010 TAS.
