Quake Live has spent the better part of a year in a closed beta stage, being tweaked constantly in the quest for perfection. To date, the only way to access the game was to receive an invitation from someone who held a beta account, but as of Tuesday anyone can register an account and play for free.

"First, we want to thank everyone who has been playing, testing, providing feedback, inviting friends and hopefully enjoying the QUAKE LIVE closed beta," taken from a post made on the Quake Live forums.

"We've grown considerably over the past 6 months and are now excited to announce that we're opening QUAKE LIVE to the general public as an open beta the evening of Tuesday, February 24th. On Monday morning (U.S. central time) we'll be taking beta.quakelive.com down for about 36 hours and then opening to the public at www.quakelive.com on Tuesday evening."

For those of you who already have a beta account, player statistics will be wiped once the open beta is released, however, account names will be retained. As for inactive accounts, any account that hasn't been used in the 28 days prior to the open beta will be deleted.

Developer notes detailing the game will be released with the open beta, as well as a summary of some of the features id Software plan to implement over the coming months.