Blastar: The Video Game Elon Musk Created as a Child

Musk was introduced to computing at around age 10, when he saw a computer in a Johannesburg shop and persuaded his father to buy him a Commodore VIC-20.^{[1][2][12][13]} The machine came with a workbook for the BASIC programming language that was designed to take about six months. According to Ashlee Vance, Musk became so absorbed that he stayed up for three days without much sleep and finished it.^[1][11][13]

Programming suited him perfectly: it rewarded long periods of intense focus and allowed a curious child to build something from nothing. It also connected to his other passions — science fiction and space.^[1][3]

Blastar is a fixed-screen shooter in the spirit of the arcade games of the early 1980s. The player controls a spaceship and must destroy an alien space freighter. The published listing described the enemy vessel as carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and "status beam machines," a phrase that has delighted fans ever since.^[1][4][7][9]

The program was compact enough to fit on a magazine page, yet complete, with movement, firing and scoring. Vance notes that it was not a groundbreaking game, but it was an impressive achievement for a 12-year-old working alone with no teacher.^[1]

Rather than simply share the game with friends, Musk treated it as a product. He sent it to PC and Office Technology, a South African trade magazine that printed programs readers could type into their own computers, and the magazine bought it for about $500.^{[1][4][9][15]} Blastar appeared in the magazine's 1984 pages alongside a short description and the full listing, credited to E. R. Musk.^[1][4][10]

Biographers point to the sale as the first time Musk turned engineering into income — the start of a pattern that ran through Zip2, X.com and every company since.^[2][3][11] Around the same time he and his brother Kimbal even tried to open a video-game arcade near their school, a plan that ended only because they were too young to secure the permits.^[1]

Video games remained part of Musk's life. He has said gaming helped draw him into software, and in his conversations with Lex Fridman he has discussed games at length, from strategy titles to role-playing games.^[5] In his 2023 biography, Walter Isaacson describes how strategy games served as a form of relaxation and competition for Musk even while he ran several companies.^[2]

That enthusiasm also shaped Tesla's products: the company's cars include a built-in "Arcade" with playable games, and Tesla engineers have partnered with game developers to bring titles to its in-car screens.^[6]

In 2015, after the story of Blastar spread through Vance's biography, a reader named Tomas Lloret recreated the game from the published listing and put a playable HTML5 version online, letting anyone try the 12-year-old Musk's creation.^{[1][4][7][8][10][14]} The revival turned a footnote into a favorite piece of Musk lore and a reminder of how early his instinct to build and ship appeared.