Now you can play the game that Elon Musk wrote at the age of 12

A talented person is talented in everything. This phrase perfectly describes the American inventor Elon Mask like no other. He created one of the most successful payment services in the world of PayPal, then figured out how to make Tesla electric cars popular, and then switched to conquering space as part of his company SpaceX. But as a child in 1984, Elon thought in completely different categories. At that time, he was most interested in video games.

When Mask was 12 years old, he lived in South Africa. As a child, curious and diligent, he studied a programming language and began to write his first game on space subjects. Still, the cosmos was an important topic for him throughout his life. The game was called Blastar and was a simple shooter in which you need to control a miniature spacecraft, firing from enemy alien ships.

Yes, today this game does not look impressive. But do not forget that in those years, the Atari 2600 gaming console dominated the market, and the console that revolutionized the video game world Nintendo Entertainment System (known as the Taiwan clone Dendy in our country) would be born only a year later, in 1985. It should not be forgotten that Elon Mask in 1984 was only 12 years old. I also learned to program in QBasic at about this age, but my business did not get to the release of a full-fledged game. I released my first game only in 2009, when I was 27 years old.

Already at a young age, Musk understood that any of his work could be sold. Therefore, he sold the source code for his game to PC and Office Technology for $ 500. Later, a scan of a 12-year programmer’s page from this magazine appeared in Ashley Vance’s biography book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Journey to a Fantastic Future.

But on this the fate of the game Blastar is not over. Nowadays, a programmer from Google Lloret Llinares found the original code of the game and recreated the game in such a way that it could be launched directly in the Internet browser using HTML5. You yourself can play the first game of the ingenious inventor by going to the appropriate site. by this link . Control of the game is very simple: the arrow keys you move your ship on the screen, and you need to shoot with the spacebar.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/games/teper-vy-mozhete-sygrat-v-igru-kotoruyu-elon-mask-napisal-v-vozraste-12-let.html.