With several years of effort to make Q-BA-MAZE a reality, I have a long answer to the question, "How did you come up with Q-BA-MAZE?" But that is the 99% perspiration part. The 1% inspiration is pretty simple and the subject of this post:
Living in New York City, I jumped out of an architecture career to start a business making computer generated images of buildings for architects. Crazy. But somehow it worked. And as a bonus (not a Wall St. bonus, but a bonus nonetheless) I had some time and the tools for my own design work.
One day, sitting in my apartment/office I remembered this marble run my grandfather had made many years ago. I loved playing with
this as a boy on visits to Grandpa's house. I also loved Lego and building elaborate structures with wooden blocks to make tunnels for my toy cars. All of these favorite toys of my boyhood were in my mind and I wondered, "What if the hand-carved blocks in Grandpa's marble run were loose and could be continually reconfigured into different pathways?"
So I fired up the computer and drew two rectangular blocks, each with a spiral groove, one right-handed and the other left-handed. I made a whole set of these blocks and played with them in the computer, making the structure shown here. But the pathway just wouldn't go where I wanted it to. There was something inherently limiting about the design. I wanted the ball to be able to 
twist and turn anywhere, but the rectangular shape and the single entrance and exit in each block did not provide sufficient design freedom. Then I realized that a CUBE with more entrances and exits would both simplify the system and increase the design freedom for the user.
To test the strength of this cube concept in reality, I made a plaster prototype and ran marbles through it. The double-exit blocks really clinched it. They created such anticipation about where the marbles would go. I wasn't sure about how to proceed from there, but I knew I wanted to pursue this marble run idea.
This is post #1 in a series on "The Making of Q-BA-MAZE"
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