Before making a name for himself heading unfathomably successful companies like PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla, Elon Musk was just another 12-year-old kid who wanted to make a video game. Residing in South Africa at the time, Musk was fascinated with space, in turn inspiring him to create Blastar and eventually leading him to oversee the first cargo mission to the International Space Station instituted by a private company.
As expected from a title made by a kd in 1984, Blastar is a conventional 2D fixed shooter with minimalist objectives: shoot the bad guys and avoid being shot. The bad guys in this case are “alien freighters carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.” So, nothing out of the usual.
Drawing influence from the popular games of its time, such as Galaga and Space Invaders, Blastar is visually unflattering, mechanically primitive, and a whole lot of fun in short spurts. The rights to Blastar were ultimately sold to a magazine publication called PC and Office Technology for $500. The page in which Blastar made an appearance was later reproduced in the biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, penned by Ashlee Vance.
More recently, after getting his hands on the game’s source code, Google engineer Tomas Lloret rebuilt Blastar for HTML 5. Courtesy of Mr. Lloret, you can play the game here.
