{"id":31415,"date":"2016-10-26T18:46:50","date_gmt":"2016-10-27T01:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/10\/play-the-pc-game-elon-musk-wrote-as-a-pre-teen"},"modified":"2017-04-24T19:26:09","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T02:26:09","slug":"play-the-pc-game-elon-musk-wrote-as-a-pre-teen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/10\/play-the-pc-game-elon-musk-wrote-as-a-pre-teen","title":{"rendered":"Play the PC game Elon Musk wrote as a pre-teen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/play-the-pc-game-elon-musk-wrote-as-a-pre-teen2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Elon Musk is obsessed with space. At age 30, he founded SpaceX. At age 41, he oversaw the first cargo mission to the International Space Station by a private company. And at age 12, as a kid living in South Africa, he made a space-themed PC game called <em>Blastar<\/em>. Now, thanks to the power of the internet, <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/blastar-1984.appspot.com\/\">you can play that game<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Musk sold the code for Blastar for $500 to the magazine <em>PC and Office Technology<\/em>, and a reproduction of the page it appeared on was published in Ashlee Vance\u2019s biography <em>Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future<\/em>. From there, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Tomas_Lloret\/status\/608117771378032642\" target=\"new\">Tomas Lloret Llinares<\/a> \u2014 a software engineer at Google \u2014 took the code and rebuilt the game to work in HTML5.<\/p>\n<p>Your mission, as the game\u2019s lonely space pilot, is to \u201cdestroy [the] alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.\u201d <em>Blastar<\/em> is mostly a mix of <i>Space Invaders<\/i> and <i>Asteroid<\/i>, though it\u2019s much more basic. There is never more than two ships on the screen, there are few sound effects, and \u2014 like many games of its time \u2014 it really has no ending. It\u2019s <em>almost<\/em> unimpressive; that is, until you remember that it was made by a 12-year-old in 1984.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2015\/6\/9\/8752333\/elon-musk-blastar-pc-game?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=entry&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook\">http:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2015\/6\/9\/8752333\/elon-musk-blastar-p...e=facebook<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Elon Musk is obsessed with space. At age 30, he founded SpaceX. At age 41, he oversaw the first cargo mission to the International Space Station by a private company. And at age 12, as a kid living in South Africa, he made a space-themed PC game called Blastar. Now, thanks to the power of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":362,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,2019,418,9,1514,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-elon-musk","category-internet","category-military","category-space-travel","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/362"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31415"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49693,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31415\/revisions\/49693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}