Pyroman University

Pyroman University (PMU) was a fan Web site dedicated to the popular video game franchises: Golden Sun and The Legend of Zelda. It featured game coverage and reviews, fan art, and other media. I wrote an extensive main feature and crowd favorite, "Bowser's Column" (parodying the character Bowser from the Super Mario video game franchise), where you can write to Bowser and he'd respond to your questions. I also hosted the PMU Forums, where our community truly thrived and discussed everything from video games to general topics. The community we fostered made PMU special, and ultimately a long-running, active, and underrated small fan site. It was not monetised, never got too big, and was just a cool place for fans to hang out.

The webmaster, P131 (that's me!), created PMU on May 8, 2002 and ran the site for several years. PMU's host, Asylum1, was targeted by a group of malicious actors and all their hosted sites were deleted in approximately summer 2009. Since I had no proper backups and was heavily invested in university education while the hack occurred, I decided to keep PMU closed. My domain name (pyromanuniversity.com) was also seized, so that made it even harder to try to restore PMU. Imagine losing your "life's work", which is what this felt like since I dumped years of my life into building, designing, writing, coding, etc. PMU all from scratch. It really hurt to lose PMU when it was reduced to atoms.

I didn't have time to create and run PMU again from scratch, especially when I'd be entering the working world after a few more years at university. A younger naive me believed I could bring back PMU one day, but as I've gotten older (this was all 20 years ago after all) I realised I do not have the time or energy for this hobby. Plus, the internet in its current form has changed, given that most persons browse the internet through apps.

If you're reading this, it means you probably visited PMU 20 years ago. And if that's the case, hi. :) You can check out PMU by visiting the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive (archive.org) and see historical snapshots of what it looked like back in the day. Go down memory lane! Popular features like "Bowser's Column" were successfully archived there. Some of the snapshots even saved parts of the PMU Forums, so you can browse the Forums and see historical posts from gamers 20 years ago!

Rest in peace, PMU. You were a wonderful site that, at its popularity peak, somehow managed to reach 10,000 unique visitors in a single day. Not too shabby for a high schooler who loved video games and wanted to foster a community of gamers and fans.

Finally, I'll close this memorial with my old Web site slogan when I was a cringey teenager with a dream of creating a web site for my favorite games, and came up with the genius idea of calling it Pyroman University:

"Like fire? Like video games? That's all you need to know."

See You Space Cowboy,

P131



P.S. - I don't really stream, but I posted my Twitch channel below in case one day I decide to do so.

Posted: October 15, 2025