How did Cat do that?

Have you seen the video of the super-size Jenga game played with Caterpillar’s equipment?

The company created the video to promote its Built For It Trials series. Nearly two million people have checked it out as of this writing. If you’re one of the few who hasn’t, you can see it here.

If you’ve ever played Jenga, you know how tricky it is to pull out the rectangular blocks one at a time and move them to the top without making them all come crashing down. The game gets more challenging as the bottom of the stack has fewer blocks and the top has more.

So how did Cat create this first video in its Built For It Trials series?

The idea was to have five Cat machines play with 27 blocks, removing and repositioning them one by one without making the stack fall, the company says.

A Jenga game and Matchbox-size cars were used to craft a plan of action.

To make the blocks slide easier, they each received a sprinkling of the wax used on shuffleboard tables to make game pucks slide faster. The blocks were so large that crew members bought up every can of shuffleboard wax they could find within a 40-mile radius of the film set. How much wax was used? A total of 72 cans.

Each block weighed 600 pounds. The total weight of the blocks used to create the stack was more than 8 tons.

Twelve GoPro cameras were used to record the game. Two were placed on the ground and remained intact throughout the video shoot, although one of the cameras came within an inch of being smashed by a gigantic falling block.

“We have the footage showing every step that we took,” Cat’s Facility Marketing Manager Marty Dains says in the Behind the Scenes clip. “There was nothing staged about it. It was what it was.”