Long before Tesla, SpaceX or even PayPal, a 12-year-old Elon Musk was already building things with code He created a space-themed video game called Blastar using BASIC The idea was simple: the player controlled a spacecraft and had to destroy an alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and “status beam machines” The player started with five ships, effectively giving them five lives In December 1984, the source code was published as a type-in listing in the South African magazine PC and Office Technology Elon was 13 by the time the issue appeared, and he was paid around $500 for the code There was no app store or modern game engine or YouTube tutorial at all The game was printed as lines of code across magazine pages so readers could manually type it into their own computers More than 40 years later, the original code has been transcribed and can still be run through a Spectravideo emulator A browser version was also recreated from the original magazine listing At 12 years old, Elon was already turning ideas into working technology First, he programmed spaceships on a screen Decades later, he began building real rockets and spacecraft