Pyroman University returns. That is a sentence I did not expect to write or something I ever believed would happen again.
If you’re new here, you can read about our history. Pyroman University (PMU) first began in 2002 back when I was entering high school. I coded and ran the Web site practically myself for about a solid 7 years total before my host was maliciously hacked and I lost everything. PMU was erased from existence, and the last vestiges of what it used to be can be found in Archive.org’s Way Back Machine.
Time travel with the Way Back Machine to see what PMU looked like here. Search for “www.pyromanuniversity.com”
After PMU was hacked, I was so hurt. I lost all the years of work, and I thought I’d never recover from it. It was such a short time in my life, but it was a time when I poured my free time, passion, and love of video games into it. It was a hallmark site that, at its peak, had reached 10,000 unique visitors daily. A former brilliant Web site that had a pretty decently large fan base that visited it in the era before social media. MySpace existed, Facebook was “The Facebook” and had just began expanding to everyone – not just college students. There was no such thing as smartphones, Twitter, Instagram, tracking, etc.
Over the years I’ve reflected as I’ve grown up, entered the workforce, and experienced the crushing machinery of capitalism being fueled by the blood of the middle class (Simpsons reference), I’ve experienced so much. My love for video games hasn’t changed like I thought it would. I’m still passionate about many hobbies, but I’ve always stuck with video games and computers as some of my all-time favorite hobbies. I’m sure a lot of you reading this can relate.
And one day as I sat at my computer and had entertained thoughts of PMU’s resurrection for years, I suddenly said to myself, why don’t I bring it back? After all, the internet is a very different place these days. Social media has systematically wiped out the myriad of fan sites, personal Forums, Topsites (remember those?), Guestbooks, etc. Now, people generally just open their web browsers and visit social media sites or places like Reddit (which, to an extent “is social media”, but sort of a hybrid as it’s more Forum-like and pseudo-anonymous).
Most of the fan sites have disappeared. Sites like GameFaqs.com have been purchased by a large corporation, and it won’t be long before the GameFaqs we are all familiar with will transform into something totally different and less useful to us.
Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, or maybe even too much nostalgia. But I miss the old internet. A lot of the creativity of the World Wide Web isn’t the same anymore, and you have to search far and wide to find the creative fan sites and forums. The inspiration to bring back PMU struck a creative cord in me, and I figured that, while I’ll never be able to bring PMU back to its former glory, I can certainly reinstitute some of it. I decided to recreate PMU from scratch in January 2023. It’s fitting, because I believe PMU’s original host was hacked in 2010, marking 13 years since PMU was erased from the internet.
I’m now quite an adult. I pay taxes, contribute toward retirement funds to help me in my late years, get my health checks, etc. I have lots of responsibilities, but I’ll always hold my passions closely in my heart. All the work I put into PMU would one day disappear from the Wayback Machine in Archive.org. Therefore, it felt like the timing was right to bring back PMU. PMU will never get to the size that it was when I was a young kid with all the time in the world to dedicate to it. But I am looking for preservation, as well as to scratch that creative itch and give to the internet a core memory of what the old internet used to be like.
I’m hoping to bring back a fun fan site for gamers, specifically centering my content around my favorite video game franchises as well as other games I love – The Legend of Zelda, Golden Sun, Final Fantasy, Pokemon, and Tales Of (to name a few).
I don’t have a roadmap yet, but I have plans I’ve been entertaining in the back of my mind for years now. Let’s see what the newest reveal of PMU will bring.
I’m excited to introduce some new ideas as well as hosting PMU up, primarily for preservation of a simple time in existence. A time where getting online was fun and an exploration. A time where we were anonymous online. A time before social media and the centralization of the internet.
Stick around and let’s see where PMU takes us.
And as for you, dear visitor, I’d love to hear your thoughts and get your feedback on what I can do to serve up a great experience at PMU.
Thanks for hanging out!
Kind regards,
Pyroman131