Tesla CEO Elon Musk has confirmed “Blastar,” the video game he created as a child in his native South Africa, will not be available for in-car play via Tesla Arcade anytime soon.
Musk’s development of Blastar as a child came from his self-noted obsession with computers and space. Ten-year-old Musk was at the Sandton City Mall in Johannesburg, South Africa when he saw his first computer. In his biography, author Ashlee Vance wrote that Musk said, “There was an electronics store that mostly did hi-fi-type stuff, but then, in one corner, they started stocking a few computers. It was like, ‘Whoa. Holy s***!’ I had to have that and then hounded my father to get the computer.”
In a 1984 issue of South African computer magazine PC and Office Technology, the 167 lines of code required to run Blastar were published. Blastar was a video game written by a 12-year old computer and space obsessed programmer who went by the name E.R. Musk, who is now the CEO of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and The Boring Company. Musk sold the code to the game that requires the player “to destroy an alien space freighter, which is carrying deadly Hydrogen Bombs and Status Beam Machines” for $500. While he noted it as “a trivial game…but better than Flappy Bird,” in an interview with Wait But Why, Musk’s Blastar game is available for play online thanks to SpaceX Flight Software Engineer Tomas Llinares, but don’t expect it to hit your Tesla dash screen anytime soon.
While Tesla and Musk fans everywhere have tried Blastar for themselves, Musk says he is “way too embarrassed to put that on a Tesla.”
Tesla initially added gaming with the Software Version 9 update on October 5, 2018, with the release of TeslAtari. The update provisioned Model S, Model X, and Model 3 vehicles with a selection of classic Atari games. A suite of robust action games like Beach Buggy Racing 2 and Cuphead would follow in subsequent software updates, notably V10 that also included video streaming through Netflix and YouTube.
Tesla and Musk have tried to make the electric vehicles they produce entertaining while still maintaining their high-performance standards. However, the most hardcore Musk fans will not get their wish of having Blastar available for play on their Tesla dash screen. Perhaps, the CEO will change his mind eventually, but for now, those interested in saving the world from alien firefighters from destroying the universe will have to do it from the comfort of their own computer.