The origin is actually quite simple. Ed and I have been friends for many years. Early on, he was fortunate enough to get into game development (starting with pinball) and I chose the less glamorous route. We had always wanted to collaborate on something so the opportunity arose where he asked me to design a level for MK3. I had no involvement in prior games but watched from the sidelines behind the scenes. If I recall it was as simple as "Hey Kent, design a level for MK3". I told him my general idea and worked on the images and tried to imagine how they would look in the game. I would send him some static images as I finished them and when I was done, he assembled them into a working level in (very) early game development. We live hours apart so I made a trip to his house in Dec. of '93 to review how it looked. This is what the video was made from. I was seeing it for the first time. It looked good to me but needed some expansion (we used the same element a few times to fill in) and some tweaking to make it look like it fit with the other levels being developed. Due to multiple factors (difficulty in collaborating hours apart with no hi-speed Internet back in the day), and general limitations of the number of levels, etc. it (as well as a few others) didn't make the cut. As a consolation he later asked me to do the sprites for the MK3 mini-game. I made them over the weekend and traveled later to see them in action after Mark did the development of the mini-game itself. I believe at that point MK3 was in early production so I got to see the game start to finish. The fact that I could contribute anything at all, get credited and have my name as part of the hidden mini-game meant the world to me (my 15 min of fame I guess). We remain friends to this day but unfortunately due to his insane schedule we don't see each other as often as we'd like.
