Time to celebrate! This week Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures celebrates one year of operation, and you have been cordially invited to this week's Hyborian celebrations. To celebrate this magnificent event, the court of Conan has prepared some exciting gifts that will be freely distributed out to all Hyborians.

Game Director on Age of Conan, Craig Morrison, has taken a moment to reflect on the one year anniversary. He also takes the opportunity to talk more about the upcoming update to the game, focusing on some of the less known features that the update will introduce such as social pets, more populated guild cities and more. Read the letter here.

What better way to celebrate a year of existence than coloring the sky? Starting from today, all characters will be granted a firework item that can be ignited once every eight hours. That is quite a long cool down – so use it wisely! To receive your firework, simply type /claim when you are in the game and the firework item will be put in your backpack.

Using your fireworks wisely, and capturing it in a screenshot, could prove valuable to you. We have teamed up with GameRigs who will be hosting an Age of Conan One Year Anniversary Screenshot Competition starting today and ending on Monday May 25th. All you have to do is capture the festivities in a screenshot - in any way you like, let your creativity run wild - and send it to GameRigs and you might end up winning some exclusive loot! For more information, please check the GameRigs competition website.

As a token of gratitude to the veterans of the community, we have chosen to award all accounts that have accumulated at least six months of subscription time since launch a free character slot. Your dedication is a great inspiration to everyone on the development team, and we hope that this token of appreciation shows our continued gratitude. This offer will also be available to those who accumulate six months of subscription later. The additional character slot will be made available with the launch of Update 5.

For those of you who have not quite racked up six months of subscription yet, you will have the opportunity to purchase a new character slot for 15 EUR/USD. The process will be quick and easy - just log into your account page and follow the instructions. You will only be allowed to purchase a maximum of two character slots. This new service will be available with the launch of Update 5.

To celebrate the first year of Age of Conan, our volunteer forum moderators have come up with an anniversary competition on the official forums. Or rather 3 competitions to be exact! Creative players can send in a drawing, poem, song or video. The best one of each will be granted a custom forum avatar and user title of their own choice. What better way to really make yourself seen on the forums and stand out of the crowd! The three competitions run until 20th of May so hurry up if you want to participate! Enter here.

Age of Conan is a good-looking game, no doubt about it, and with the recent launch of DirectX 10 functionalities it looks even better. We took a stroll down memory lane to look at how the game looked several years before release, while it was still being worked on by the team. How things have changed! Here are a few very, very old screenshots:

Machinima.com is providing some amazing prize packages with over eight thousand dollars in loot in their Age of Conan "Quest for Gear" contest. The deadline for entries is May 31, 2009 - so there is still time! If you are feeling creative - go for it. Who knows, you might end up winning some top-of-the-line computer gaming hardware!

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...and counting! You can also check out the many Guild websites here!