During the Summer of 1993, after having been informed of my opportunity to submit puzzles to the newly formed "Imagine" magazine, I sat down one day to create a new style of puzzle. I wanted something simple, elegant, and more puzzle, less maze. I was flipping through the pages of "Games" magazine, when I ran into a group of puzzles called "Battleship". Essentially, the goal of the puzzle was to position ships of different lengths (like in the game of Battleship), so that the ship pieces totaled the numbers at the end of the different rows and columns.

I thought that this was an excellent idea for a puzzle. I played around with different ideas, until I created the concept of having a predetermined "stamp" to fill in the grid. The first stamp I created was a happy accident. Notice that from two viewpoints, the stamp's columns add to the same numbers (1, 1, 1, 1), whereas from the other two viewpoints, the rows add to different numbers (1, 2, 0, 1 or 1, 0, 2, 1). The same happy accident occurred while creating the second stamp as well.

Rubber Stamp puzzles two and three were both published at the same time, in the very first issue of "Imagine".