Early experiments with icons

If you want to look at early experiments with icon based game interfaces, you could check out Shadowfire for ZX Spectrum.

You can find Spectrum emulators here.
Legal copies of Shadowfire seem to be in short supply. Even if you manage to acquire one, you'll probably end up downloading a tape image from a torrent site anyway.

The top part of the interface is fixed, at the top left are mini icons for your team members that will change color or start blinking when stuff happens to them, below that a timer. In the middle a small map above a "marquee" text box, and a portrait of the currently active team member on the right.

Selecting one of your six team members is pretty intuitive,

and so is the status screen.

On the bottom left, green bars for strength, speed, health and weight carried, on the bottom right icons for movement(green), object manipulation(yellow), combat(red) and exiting the current interface (gray).

The object manipulation interface is a bit weird by modern standards, because the same style is used for both action(verb) icons and item(object) icons.

In the left section, we see the items in the present location, in the middle section the items carried, and in the right section a mixture of action and interface navigation icons. When we select the "take" icon, we enter a modal state indicated by the green border, where only an item from the first section can be selected. The exit icon doubles as a cancel action for any modal state.

While carrying one of the two teleport devices, we "use" (cyan icon of a finger pressing a button) some sort of navigation computer, and are presented with a choice of three different infiltration points. We pick the purple one.

Once at our destination, we drop the teleport device and use it to transport over the other team  members.

The left section contains icons for people at the remote location, and the middle section people at the current location.

The movement interface is fairly straightforward:

The combat interface is a bit more complex, picking one of the different combat actions in the right section enters a modal state where we have to select a direction as a parameter.