Blastar

Long before rockets and electric cars, Elon Musk was a twelve-year-old in South Africa with a home computer and a lot of patience. In 1983 he wrote a video game called Blastar and sold it to a magazine for about $500. It is a small story, but it is the first proof of a habit that would define everything after: he would rather build a thing than buy it.

What was Blastar?

Blastar was a simple space shooter, the kind of game that was cutting edge for a home computer in 1983. You piloted a spaceship and had to destroy an alien freighter that was carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and what the young Elon Musk called "status beam machines." The whole game was about 123 lines of code written in BASIC, an early and beginner-friendly programming language. By the standards of today it was tiny. By the standards of a twelve-year-old teaching himself with no help, it was a real piece of work.

How a kid taught himself to code

Elon Musk got his first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, and worked through the manual to learn how to program it. The instructions said the lessons should take several months. He finished them in a few days, barely sleeping. That is the part that matters more than the game. Nobody assigned Blastar to him and nobody taught him. He wanted to understand how the machine worked, so he read until he did, and then he used what he learned to make something new.

Why that $500 still matters

The money was small, but the lesson was not. A magazine called PC and Office Technology paid him around $500 for the game. For the first time, something he had built with his own mind was worth money to a stranger. Look at his companies now and the same shape keeps repeating. Teach yourself something most people find too hard, use it to build a product, and sell it. Blastar is where that loop started, decades before anyone had heard of him.

The bottom line

Blastar was not important because it was a great game. It was important because of what it revealed about the person who made it. At twelve, with no one telling him to, Elon Musk learned to code, built his own product, and sold it. Everything he is known for grew out of that same simple move, done at ever larger scale.

Related

Keep reading: Growing Up in Pretoria, Leaving South Africa at 17. Zoom out to the Personal Life timeline or the State of Elon overview.