Elon Musk, one of the most innovative entrepreneurs of our time tried his hand at creating video games when he was much younger. In 1984, at the age of just 12, he coded a video game, a space-themed PC game called ‘Blastar.’
During his childhood, Elon Musk was interested in computers and by the age of 12, he had written the code for his own video game called ‘Blastar’ at computer VIC-20 in BASIC language. He even received $500 when he sold its source code to South African magazine PC and Office Technology.
This video game was never released, but more than 30 years later, you can now finally actually play the game he created, thanks to the power of the internet. A screenshot of the magazine page the source code appeared on was published in Ashlee Vance’s biography ‘Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future’ in 2015. From there, Tomas Lloret Llinares, a former software engineer at Google, who currently works at SpaceX, took the code and rebuilt the game to work in HTML5.
The gameplay is simple. You play the game as a space pilot who has to “destroy [the] alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.” It’s almost unimpressive, but a lot from a 12-year-old boy living in the early age of computers.
Elon Musk, the current tech sensation, is most famous these days for his electric car company Tesla, and for the spaceships, he created with his private spaceflight company SpaceX.
You can play “Blastar” for yourself by clicking here.
