While he’s now best known for his prowess as the head of Tesla and SpaceX, in 1984 Elon Musk was a regular 12-year-old child, except he was designing video games, and now you can play his creation, Blastar.
The code for Musk’s game was published online by tech author Ashlee Vance, who has written about the South African entrepreneur in the past, but with the help of Tomas Lloret, a software engineer at Google, the game is now available to play online.
.@valleyhack published some game code written by @elonmusk as a kid. Then @tomas_lloret turned it into a game http://t.co/Gqm0cvDFXu
— Josh (@Tyrangiel) June 9, 2015
It’s apparent that even as a 12-year-old Musk was into everything space with his game looking like it was heavily influenced by the 1978 arcade classic, Space Invaders.
Musk asked players of the game to “destroy alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines”.
While it might not look like much, or play like much frankly, Musk was still thinking with the mind of an entrepreneur and, not long after it was created, he sold the rights for US$500 to PC Office and Technology, now more commonly known as PC. These days, however, Musk might be a little too busy to create Blastar 2 for his legions of fans, possibly because he’s too busy facilitating real space travel … typical.
Cargo is offloaded and spacecraft is powered down. #Dragon back in its nest after about 5 weeks at the @Space_Station pic.twitter.com/4irpMtg9yw
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 21, 2015
Click on the image below to play the game.
