Elon Musk 'Too Embarrassed' To Put His Tiny Invention In A Tesla

Before Elon Musk was the Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink CEO, Elon Musk was a 12 year-old tech prodigy who wrote an 8 bit video game named "Blastar" in 1984 all by his lonesome. Today, however, Musk appears coy about talking about his first video game, and “way too embarrassed to put that on a Tesla.”

As the name implied, the space shooter game was about blasting invading alien spaceships. The game's source code was published in the magazine, PC and Office Technology, and Musk received $500 for it.

"(It was) a trivial game ... but better than Flappy Bird," claimed Musk.

Flappy Bird is a devilishly difficult mobile game developed by Vietnamese video game artist and programmer Dong Nguyen and released in 2013 to wide acclaim.

A reproduction of the page Blastar was published in Ashlee Vance's biography, "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future." Tomas Lloret Llinares, a software engineer at Google, later took the code and rebuilt the game to work in HTML5.

As Blastar's space pilot, your mission is to "destroy (an) alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines." There are never more than two ships on the screen. And there are only a few sound effects in this never-ending game.

You can play Blastar here courtesy of Llinares.

Now, Elon Musk the Tesla CEO is apparently entertaining nostalgic thoughts on making Blastar available on the infotainment system in all of the Tesla electric vehicles (EVs). On Monday, Musk was engaged in a tweet string with fans wanting to know more about video games for his Teslas when one of these people mentioned Blastar.

“Where can we play Blastar?" tweeted @farrxy.

To which Musk replied: "I’d be way too embarrassed to put that on a Tesla. It’s like a kid’s drawing."

The Tesla CEO, however, noted that ever since he was a kid, he's been "obsessed" with space.

Fans were quick to thank this obsession which has paved ground for Musk's ventures like SpaceX and a possible Mars colonization.

A tweeter, @Kristennetten, noetd "I am more than thankful that you were obsessed with Space. Everything put into the equation to create this output, to make the wonderful one-of-kind you, even the hard stuff. What a sad thing to think that there would be no SpaceX to push & pull aerospace to where it is now."

Later on, the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley took up the thread to tweet: "Any other space games coming out for Tesla or was there any other secret games as a kid you made?"