Sticky man wall crawler toys like the ones pictured above have been around for years, but nobody had ever bothered to build one the size of a human being. They’ve all been cheap and tiny little pieces of junk, never having climbed down anything much taller than the average household wall.

All of that changed recently when the Japanese TV show Hey! Spring of Trivia decided to conduct a grand experiment. The procedure was as follows:

1. Build a giant sticky man
2. Find a skyscraper
3. Wait for a day without much wind
4. Drop the giant sticky man on the side of the building and see how far it can climb down

It seemed pretty simple, but their first attempt at getting the sticky man to climb down Akita City’s Port Tower was a disaster:

After rebuilding the giant sticky man and making its body to sticky stuff ratio closer to that of the actual toy, they tried again (getting much better results):

It wasn’t able to make it all the way down the tower, but the human-sized sticky man will still no doubt go down in history as one of mankind’s greatest achievements.