Have you ever wondered how many video games feature those giant stone heads from Easter Island? No? Well, someone did, and the result is Moai in Video Games, a site with one beautifully simple premise: find every Moai that has ever appeared in a video game, screenshot it, and log it. The current count? 1,055 games. That number is still climbing.
The site is run by @gingerbeardman, and it's been covered by Nintendo Life and Retro Gamer magazine, which should give you some idea of how seriously (and joyfully) this project is taken. The tagline says it all: 🗿 + 🎮 = 😎.
What I love about clicking around this site is how well-organized it is despite the absurdity of the subject matter. You can browse the full catalogue by title, by year, by developer, or by platform. The platform list alone is a trip. There are 121 platforms represented, everything from the Atari 2600 and MSX to the Playdate and Switch 2. Someone found a Moai in a Plug 'n Play device. There are Moai on the Gizmondo. The Zeebo! I didn't even know the Zeebo had games.
The FAQ page is where the real history nerd stuff lives, and it's fascinating. There's a whole timeline explaining why Moai became such a fixture in Japanese games specifically. It traces back to a reproduction Moai displayed at EXPO '70 in Osaka, a Moai-like statue (called a "Moyai") installed at Shibuya in 1980, and then a real Moai on display at the EXPOLAND amusement park in 1982 that apparently "captured the attention of the public and kick-started the meme of Moai in games." Konami's prolific use of Moai across their games? That's attributed to one person: Yoshinori "Moai" Sasaki. The FAQ also notes that a 1986 issue of POPCOM magazine featured a Moai history piece that may have been responsible for doubling the number of Moai appearances in games that year. This is the kind of deep-cut cultural research I live for.
Each game entry includes a screenshot showing the actual Moai appearance, along with the year, developer, and platforms. Many entries are community-submitted, with credit given to the person who spotted and reported each one. There's even an Unconfirmed Sightings page listing 85 games that are suspected to contain Moai but still need screenshots to verify. It reads like a bounty board for the world's most niche scavenger hunt.
The range of games is wild. You've got Castlevania, Animal Crossing, Death Stranding, Wacky Races on the NES, a 1996 Taito game called Magical Date, Mario Kart World, and a whole entry for a game called "Chess is Stupid!" The oldest entries go back to 1983. The newest are from 2025 and even 2026 (an upcoming Playdate game called Agents of Groove). The developer list has over 700 entries. Seven hundred different studios have, at some point, put a stone head in their game.
I also want to mention the merch page, titled "Moai-chan-dise," which sells a handful of t-shirts and stickers. The whole thing has a warmth to it. This is clearly a passion project built and maintained by one person who genuinely thinks Moai are cool, and who has spent years proving that the gaming world agrees.
If you have any love for obsessive cataloguing, video game history, or the simple joy of someone caring deeply about something wonderfully specific, go spend some time at moai.games. Search for your favorite game. Check the platform list. Read the FAQ. I promise you'll come away knowing more about giant stone heads than you expected to today.