The time I spent with URJazz was definitely some of the best I've had in this community. There are lots of old levels sitting around in my JJ2 folder, most using Cool Day or Top Secret 3, from us happening upon this or that event or concept and trying everything we could think to do with it just to see what cool effects we could arrive at. Some of it failed in really obvious ways -- we tried for ages to create a sucker tube that would send you into one of three random locations, without thinking of just making the animated tiles three frames long -- but we had some great drafts and some neat stuff resulted from it, like a working money transfer system for hotels (which went through many revisions). We were always in awe of Mike, though, particularly his extended timer system for Gold Rush... we were always focused on making things work but had no concept of speed or elegance, so the player would always end up subjected to these incredibly long series of sucker tubes and warps which had the right effect in the end and yet were really annoying.

Monopoly was the culmination of a series of game levels we made... I had playable versions of Roulette, Poker, and Candyland (two-person only), and I'm sure URJazz had some other games I don't remember. (ET also made a Monopoly version which was superior to URJazz's in a few ways, but I think it was a bit buggy or something and never got released.) We were a couple of the first people to latch onto the Ground Force gametype and play around with it -- Tower of Death, for all that it's different from the rest of the Survivor pack, is actually most similar to how GF levels used to look -- but Blur undeniably took GF and ran with it far beyond anything we had imagined. We made a very technically impressive level called TW2 which again failed at concepts of gameplay (we apparently thought that backtracking was the best level design feature ever?) and somehow I ought to refurbish that and get it into the public.

URJazz also invented a gamemode related to Ground Force, called, I think, Danger Zone, that never really took off, sort of a reverse GF where each player had to destroy all the destruct scenery in the arena before the timer ran out or they'd lose. I think it was him who invented Freeze Tag, which worked well but I don't think is still around, a very simple concept where you'd freeze opponents and push them into warps in the floor. In later days he turned to CTF, particularly after winning a contest with Martian Megatropolis, but none of his later CTF levels ever ended up quite as good, which was frustrating. He focused on flow to an extreme degree, avoiding any situation where a player might conceivably hit a wall, but considerations of where a player would want to go somewhat fell to the wayside. He also made a level called Space Assault, which (to the best of my knowledge) was the first of its kind, in that both teams attacked and defended at once, and the gameplay was much shorter than that of the painful Assault3. I've paid little attention to the Assault scene so I don't really remember if this took off, but it should have. I don't think I can really explain the URORBS pack, but it was important in its own subcommunity.

I don't think Bean has gotten a mention in this thread, so I'd like to remedy that. He never released much, particularly not to any website, but the stuff he did was all very experimental and well-executed. You may be familiar with THE VOID, a monochrome platform in the middle of black space, and one of the best examples of modifying the JJ2 palette for a reason. It was one of several levels playing around with the Treasure Hunt gamemode and its possibilities, including also a very competent pass at King of the Hill. Last I remember he was playing with the textured background, he had set up a Deckstar level with the textured background as a three-dimensional floor and you had to jump over three-dimensional holes in it. It was extremely limited but quite innovative.

Mike mentioned that people are probably ranking him for his SP over his MP levels, so I'll just say mention my perception of his contribution to MP. URJazz and Bean and I, as described above, were incredibly messy people, we had these great technical ideas but they lacked polish. One great thing Mike could do, in addition to creating his own totally new concepts, was walk around in that mess and make things work for the first time. Probably the best example of that, though he might rather I didn't bring it up, is eVILHOTEL, which completely revolutionized hotels, first by adding gameplay and second by adding (limited) level design. In Mike's hands they were still vanity fests, but they were hosted in battle, and everything cost money from the furniture to the rooms themselves. This spawned a small host of imitations -- Fooville, Jmanville, Newer Rabbitaria, doubtless others I was less affiliated with -- which were largely experiments within the basic framework Mike had laid out, while we hosts ran through our heads for every possible thing we could conceivably sell in the stores or the auctions. Room extensions, metaprivileges (renaming things or tileset conversions), new and more advanced ways of attacking other people's rooms, etc. Even the duel room, bad idea as that was, got maintained in the imitation levels. Fooville, I think, although it never quite worked perfectly, was the logical next step as the store became mostly automated with an external program, and Karrot Shire seems to be the intellectual heir to that. Honorable Mike mention goes to his swiftly-canonical quiz show level design, which was more than imitated but rather copied in several other levels by other people.

There's more to talk about, but I have homework and a messy room. Sheesh. Maybe I should write my own blog sometime.