The official Bethesda Blog has reminded us that today marks the 15th anniversary of the 1997 PC launch of Quake II, the Strogg-ladden sequel to id Software's genre-defining multiplayer first person shooter.

Celebrating the affair, id Software’s Tim Willits shared some fun facts about the game:

• Only three artists made all the 2D and 3D art for the entire game.
  
• One of the original suggested names for QUAKE II was WOR, but the game’s fast-paced, tactile feel felt closer to a QUAKE game than a new franchise.
  
• ‘The Edge’ (Tim’s favorite deathmatch level in QUAKE II or any other game), has over 50 trick jumps possible in the map. Tim only designed two of them, and the rest were discovered by the QUAKE II community.

Later today, Tim plans to celebrate by taking these QUAKE action figures out of the display case and reenacting his favorite moments from the game.

Happy birthday old friend.

Ctf on the powerup server was some darn good times!

haha deadlydavo that reminds me when i was young my brother use to press the shoot and jump button and i would use the arrows.... I was the older brother :)

WAY back in '97-98, these were the years I really cut my teeth in Multiplayer gaming; So many Mods, Plugin-Player Models & Maps - The era of Gamespy, Polycount.com & PlanetQuake.com! :)

Whilst being an Aussie, this made me High Ping Bait to no end but the game was at its best when played in a LAN party! ;)

Quake 2 had a rockin' Soundtrack by Sonic Mayhem & I was amazed the day I figured out I could play the Disc in my CD Player! \m/

The Singleplayer was just ridiculously indulgent; could never pull myself away from it & once I'd finally beaten the Jorg, I couldn't wait to get a hold of the Mission packs but I also wanted figures of the Strogg and the late 'Resaurus' company made that happen! XD

Quake 2 was also the game that aided me in my push to get my Father to purchase a 3D Accelerator Card, a 3Dfx Voodoo 2 no less & thus Quake 2 was my 1st experience as to what could be achieved with Hardware Rendering. :)

Happy Birthday Quake 2, you'll always be my favourite video game alongside Doom 2.

I was blown away the first time i saw flies buzzing around decaying corpses in this game. Actually I got my first 3D card for this game, back when they were dedicated cards that you plugged into your video card. Voodoo Monster.

Long live the railgun!

It's called strafe-jumping, fpot.

Long live the railgun!

Hear hear, praise be unto Carmack, Amen.

RIP Paul Steed

I wish I could go back in time and do Q1 and 2 all over again. So much fun LAN'ing them.

Your dad was a noob, why wasn't he aiming with the mouse!

NFI. I assumed keyboard only was the default controls although i think this is incorrect. I think quake 3 and UT were the first games i played keyboard+mouse, cant remember playing any shooters before them.

Ctf on the powerup server was some darn good times!

+1 but for some reason everyone preferred that other one, ozemail or something? It was always crashing, always full of hackers, yet in the final days of CTF, powerup had no one on it and the crap server was always full.