The original Gettysburg had squares. I think it was in 61 it became hexes, so you're correct. But, D-Day was certainly published around 1961 and had hexes, so it may have been the first. Hell, I can't remember. (I first played Tactics, not Tactics II mind you, and it had squares and round counters. I think the counters had "Tnk", "Inf", "Abn" on them. Whatever it was, it was real simple.)ORIGINAL: pompack
ORIGINAL: Mynok
Hex based wargames have been around since the early seventies.
Surely longer than that. IIRC AH's Gettysburg was a hex game; that was about 1961
But the point is that PG was NOT the first hex-based game. In fact, I'm not sure it was the first hex-based PC game. Talonsoft published four or five games that year that are hex-based. (I still have every Talonsoft game published.)
PG was fun to play, up to a point, but was never more than a beer and pretzels game, IMO. It appealed to those who did not necessarily demand serious historical context. I played it for a month or two, then gave it away to a kid down the street. I just didn't care for it.
And as for the NATO symbols ... I ALWAYS use them. If a game has two modes, one NATO symbols, one sprites of some kind, I ALWAYS select the symbols. The only exception might be, for example, one of the good battlefield games, like Talonsoft's Gettysburg, when I occasionally turned on the sprites just to see what the battlefield looked like at some point in time. I always turned them off to actually playe the game.
They won't be looking at a map with pretty sprites to depict unit locations.
