Blastar, December 1984. PC and Office Technology magazine, South Africa.
A 12-year-old Elon Musk writes a sprite-based space shooter in Microsoft BASIC for the Spectravideo SV-328. Sells it to the magazine for $500. Page 69.
The Spectravideo SV-318/328 used the TI TMS9918A video chip, the same chip that powered the ColecoVision, the MSX, and the TI-99/4A. The TMS9918A has real hardware sprites. 32 of them, 8x8 or 16x16, with collision detection and a dedicated attribute table. Spectravideo BASIC exposes them through PUT SPRITE, SPRITE$, and the ON SPRITE GOSUB collision interrupt, all of which appear in the Blastar listing.
Elon even wired up an interrupt-driven collision handler instead of just polling coordinates.
The code survived because Maye Musk kept the issue. Ashlee Vance reprinted the page in the 2015 biography, and a Google engineer transcribed it into a playable HTML5 build.
Everyone starts somewhere.
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