It was only a year ago that Quake Live, id Software's free-to-play, browser-based re-creation of Quake III Arena, was unleashed upon the Internet in the form of an open beta test. For the festivities, Quake Live will be running a "Year One Event" through March 9th. Gamers that play during the next two weeks will receive a special "Year One" emblem on his or her profile. A new map was also uploaded to celebrate.

Some statistics were released today detailing the growth of the game:

The number of people that registered when the QUAKE LIVE Beta opened far exceeded our wildest expectations. Over a quarter million players created accounts right after its launch and that was through word of mouth only! Since that time, players have spent over 8.9 million hours in over 60 million ranked matches, earning an impressive 8 million awards and 810 million frags.

However, the best way to celebrate might be with the QTest Alpha, which can be downloaded from FileShack. The multiplayer-only, pre-alpha test of the original Quake was made available fourteen years ago today. Good luck running it, though: "If you run this TEST from Win95, you MUST have a 16mb RAM system."