The Sports Highlight Of The Day Is This Japanese Game Show's Slippery Stairs

Humankind is mortal. We are born, we flop around and make noise for a while, and then, inevitably, we die. That is perhaps the lesson that the diabolical makers of slippery stairs were trying to teach to their audience. I realize that asking someone to watch a nine-minute video is demanding a lot, but I hope you will trust me that I would not do this if I did not think it was important. I promise that you will be enraptured by the trials of all these little Sisyphus cosplayers.

There’s so much to like here; the delight with which the hosts watch these poor fuckers turn into runaway sleds; the contrast between the intense pounding music that plays when someone reaches the second staircase and the Mario Party-ass “Boink!” sound when they careen into their fellow competitors; the amount of times someone gets right to the top only to let up for a half-second and take the long tumble to the ground or be tackled by a vengeful rival.

There are no gimmicks to get a competitor through the slippery stair gauntlet. You can’t, say, run up it really fast—you’ll just get more owned. You can’t go up backwards, because you won’t have the leverage to hoist yourself up. The only way up is directly, scrabbling on your limbs like some kind of moist Hell Frog. This is truly the best Japanese game show stunt, and it needs to be imported stateside by some enterprising TV exec immediately.