PC game Panzer General II

The strategy game “Panzer General” was released over 25 years ago and was immediately indexed by the Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Young Persons (BPJM) due to its “omission of historical context and trivialization of the role of the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War”. The campaign mode, in which players can win the Second World War for National Socialist Germany by invading Great Britain and the USA, was seen as particularly problematic. In a subsequent hearing a few months later, the BPJM lifted the indexing of the game “Panzer General”. Due to the “predominantly schematic depiction” of the 8-bit pixel graphics and the attempt at historical contextualization in the manual, the game was henceforth approved for ages 16 and up. The experts continued to assess the glorification of nationalistic “Blitzkrieg” warfare as “very critical”, but believed that 16-year-olds already had enough historical background knowledge that “no political or other disorientation is to be expected.”

Despite or perhaps because of the temporary indexing, the game sold very well in Germany. The international success encouraged the developers at SSI to create a series of follow-up programs, the “Five-Star-Series”. As the commercial success of these programs was significantly weaker than that of “Panzer General”, the company then concentrated on direct successors in terms of content: “Panzer General II” and “Panzer General III”.

Although the video game in our collection bears the name “Panzer General II”, it is actually “Allied General” from the “Five-Star Series”. The German distributor presumably hoped that this different name would be more successful in terms of sales. However, unlike “Panzer General”, “Allied General” offered a campaign from an Allied perspective and the reception in the German gaming community was very mixed. When the official “Panzer General II” was released in Germany, the name “Panzer General 3D” was chosen, although the program did not use real 3D graphics.

The “Panzer General” series set new standards for war games with its turn-based gameplay and depiction of military battles. In order to win, players had to act in the spirit of linked arms combat and use different types of weapons for specific objectives. Over the course of the game, the abilities of your own units improve based on experience points and the individual scenarios are embedded in larger contexts.

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