Today we hear about Elon Musk and the first thing that comes to mind are his Tesla cars, his rockets and SpaceX satellites and even his madness in the form of flame throwers and tunnels to avoid traffic. Musk is now 47 years old, and when he was young he didn’t seem to think about electric cars or space rockets, since a lot of his time was devoted to video games.
The now multimillionaire CEO of some of the world’s most innovative companies was very different from when he was 12 years old, almost like anyone else. Elon Musk was looking to become a video game programmer and in 1984 he had the opportunity to publish his first game: ‘Blastar’.
Concern and creativity
We should not confuse Musk’s ‘Blastar’ with the 1983 arcade ‘Blastar’ or the 1993 Amiga ‘Blastar’. No, this game is earlier and was programmed by a young Elon in 1983. The game was published in 1984 when Elon was 12 years old, thanks to the fact that he sold it to the South African magazine ‘PC and Office Technology’ for 500 dollars. Money he used to buy another computer, comics and an edition of ‘Dungeons and Dragons’.
Blastar’ appeared on page 69 and was signed by “E. R. Musk,” which would be his stage name as a video game programmer. Musk sold the video game under the following description: “In this game you must destroy an alien space freighter, carrying lethal hydrogen bombs and status beams. Broadly speaking, ‘Blastar’ was a simplified version of ‘Alien Invaders’ where the goal was to bring down enemies before they killed us.
30 years after it was published, ‘Blastar’ came to light again thanks to Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, and Ashlee Vance, who published it in the biography of Tesla’s now CEO. Tomas Lloret, a reader and fan of Elon, decided to adapt it to HTML5 and put it online for free so that everyone would know the beginnings of Elon Musk.
And then came Rocket Science Games
Already in 1994, at the age of 23, Elon Musk was another recent graduate and came to Silicon Valley looking for any job that seemed interesting. That’s how he came to Rocket Science Games, a small studio that created video games for Sega CD, at a time when most of the stories were based on live-action scenes.
As Scott Manley points out, Musk appeared in the credits of games such as ‘Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine’, ‘Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm’ and ‘Rocket Jockey’. Within this study, Elon was in charge of writing first-level basic code, as well as writing and programming drivers that would allow the games to be controlled from different controllers.
Peter Barrett, co-founder of Rocket Science Games, mentioned in Musk’s biography that his attitude was completely erratic, as it was difficult to give him instructions because in the end he always ended up doing what he wanted.
At the end of 1995, Musk decided to leave the world of video games to focus on the internet, renewable energy and space projects. And from here we all know what happened.
