What game did Elon Musk make?

Long before rockets and electric cars, Elon Musk was a 12-year-old in South Africa with a home computer and a lot of patience.

What was Blastar?

Blastar was a simple space shooter of the kind home computers ran in 1983. The player piloted a spaceship sent to destroy an alien freighter carrying what the game called "Hydrogen Bombs and Status Beam Machines." Elon Musk wrote it in BASIC, an early, beginner-friendly programming language.

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 lessons were meant to take several months, and he finished them in a few days, barely sleeping. 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 magazine PC and Office Technology paid him about $500 for the game, the first time something he had built was worth money to a stranger. His later companies follow the same pattern: he teaches himself a subject most people find too hard, builds a product from it, and sells it. Blastar is where that loop started.

The bottom line

The magazine check was his first income from software. In 1999, 15 years later, the sale of his first software company, Zip2, to the computer maker Compaq brought him about $22 million.