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This puzzle was the first of a whole series of similar puzzles I designed well before the debut of "Imagine" magazine. I included this one in a package of puzzles left with the editors of the magazine during my first trip to the home office in the summer of 1993. While it was my least favorite of the puzzles from the packet, they decided to run it when no one stepped up to fill my shoes.
You see, during my first year of contirbuting puzzles to the magazine in the student submissions section, I was actually a student in high school. However, I was graduating at the end of the year, and I thought it would be better if they found another, younger CTY student contibutor of puzzles. So I had left them just enough puzzles to cover a year's worth of issues, plus a couple extra. But by the time the fall of 1994 rolled around, they still hadn't found another student who made puzzles. Thus, they picked one of the extra puzzles from the packet, which was this puzzle.
This puzzle really doesn't make much sense by itself. For example, that big empty space in the middle. I won't say why that's there, but it has a purpose which is completely unrelated to the rule of only passing over five striped zones. There's also an explanation for the multiple entrances and exits, and why we would have a whole assortment of randomly placed hallways in the first place. Someday perhaps all of this will make sense in the context of the rest of the puzzles in that group (which I never actually finished), but that day is not today. I'll just highlight the mystery for the time being.
If I were to complete the group of puzzles, I'd probably place them in the meta-category of "Mazes with Rules", since the multiple pathways are quite maze-like, even if they do provide a pretty open puzzle.