Elon Musk created and sold the video game Blastar at age 12.
Musk wrote Blastar in 1984, while living in Pretoria, South Africa. The game was a simple space-themed shooter written in BASIC for the Commodore VIC-20 home computer. Its premise involved destroying an alien freighter carrying hydrogen bombs.
A computer magazine called PC and Office Technology published the game's source code. Musk later sold the game to the magazine PC and Office Technology for about $500. The transaction is often cited as an early example of his interest in software and entrepreneurship.
Blastar is sometimes confused with commercially released arcade games such as Asteroids or Space Invaders. It was instead a small, unpublished-by-Musk home-computer game whose code appeared in a magazine. The game has also been recreated by enthusiasts using the surviving source code.