Azmi, often known by his handle Azmi1, is a Toronto based speedrunner whose name became closely tied to the Nintendo 64 platformer Banjo-Kazooie and its wider Rareware family of games. From grinding out full game categories to building technical resources for other runners, he helped define what high level Banjo play looked like in the late 2010s and early 2020s. On speedrun.com he is listed out of Toronto with more than a hundred full game submissions across Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Donkey Kong 64, multi game Rareware marathons and the indie title System Goose Overload.
A feature on “Speedrunning in College” described him as a full time psychology major taking five full year courses during the COVID 19 pandemic, studying online while maintaining a regular schedule of streams and runs. That profile and Azmi’s own comments there emphasize how speedrunning was not simply background entertainment but a parallel discipline, one where he applied the same focus and curiosity he brought to his coursework.
Finding Banjo-Kazooie and Learning to See Routes
In that college profile, Azmi called Banjo-Kazooie his favorite game, explaining that it was the game he knew well enough to constantly find new ideas that were fun to test and route. That mindset shows up in his run history. Rather than hovering around a single “main” category, he explored almost every major full game category on the Banjo leaderboard. His profile lists high placements in Any percent, 100 percent with FFM and 100 percent No FFM, along with challenge categories like Sandcastle, token focused routes and No DoG or DDA variants.
This breadth had two effects. First, it forced him to think about the game’s movement and resource management from many angles, not only the standard 100 percent progression. Second, it kept him close to the community’s ongoing experiments. As new glitches and route ideas emerged, he was among the runners best positioned to see how they could be woven into a complete run rather than existing as isolated tricks.
Breaking Through on the Banjo-Kazooie Leaderboards
Azmi’s international breakout came when the Banjo community began to recognize his times not just as strong performances but as new standards. A widely shared thread on the Banjo-Kazooie subreddit noted that he had taken the Any percent Nintendo 64 record down to 1:00:13, cutting almost three minutes off the previous listed time and pairing that with a 100 percent record of 1:59:55 on the same platform.
Those runs were not his ceiling. On speedrun.com his Banjo-Kazooie profile later shows a 59:41 Any percent time on N64, a mark that was recognized as a world record when it was first posted and now stands as a former record in a crowded leaderboard. In the 100 percent FFM category, he pushed his time down to 1:56:32, again taking the record into territory the community had previously treated as theoretical. That run survives today as a former world record on his YouTube channel and as a second place time on the main leaderboard.
Community reaction to these jumps was immediate. A separate thread on r/speedrun celebrated his 100 percent record run, noting how sudden the improvement looked from the outside and pointing to an “MMM early” skip and other precise clips as part of the explanation. The discussion there, with several commenters trying to unpack how the new route worked, is a good snapshot of Azmi’s role in the scene. His runs often forced the rest of the community to catch up and translate what they had just seen into shared knowledge.
System Goose Overload and an Expanding Record List
Banjo-Kazooie remained his home base, but Azmi did not limit his ambitions to a single game. The “Speedrunning in College” article noted that at the time of that 2021 profile he was credited with nine world records, most of them in Banjo-Kazooie categories but at least one in System Goose Overload, where he held the Any percent record.
On speedrun.com, System Goose Overload appears as his featured run, listed as second place in the Any percent glitchless category with a time of 33:14. That snapshot shows how quickly leaderboards for smaller indie titles can evolve, but it also underscores how willing he was to take his Banjo honed routing skills and apply them to other games. For historians of speedrunning, it marks him as part of the wider trend that saw top runners in classic console titles dip into modern indie games and leave a clear fingerprint on their early leaderboards.
Rareware Collectathon Marathons and Multi Game Challenges
Azmi’s run list also reads like a tour through Rare’s collectathon legacy. Alongside his individual Banjo times he submitted strong results in Rareware Collectathon Trilogy Any percent, Banjo-Kazooie/Banjo-Tooie marathons and other multi game challenges that required chaining entire runs together. On speedrun.com he holds a podium time in the Rareware Collectathon Trilogy Any percent category and several top four finishes in Banjo-Kazooie/Banjo-Tooie marathon formats, including a first place in the Restricted Any percent variant.
Those relay style runs are historically important because they show how communities began to formalize “series” events. Rather than treating Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie and Donkey Kong 64 as separate silos, runners like Azmi stitched them into a single performance. That helped reinforce the idea of a Rareware canon within speedrunning and created a space where players with deep familiarity across several games could express that breadth.
He did not limit himself to solo efforts. Early in his career he took part in large team relay events such as The 1545, where he appears on rosters with a wide range of runners and helps carry long multi day marathons to the finish. Those events helped knit together overlapping speedrunning communities and gave Banjo runners a larger collaborative stage.
Teaching the Tech and Building Resources
Azmi’s impact goes beyond the times he posted. In one of the official routing resources for Banjo-Kazooie, a detailed guide to “bitclips” on BanjoSpeedruns.com, he is credited as a co author alongside CrozB. Bitclips are precise clips that exploit how the game handles position and collision. The guide breaks down their setup and timing for other players. That kind of documentation, built by runners who have already proven the tech in full runs, is central to how modern speedrunning knowledge is preserved.
On the speedrun.com Banjo-Kazooie page, Azmi also appears in the forum index as the author of a thread advertising the Banjo Speedrun Discord and documenting leaderboard updates. The thread serves as a kind of public gateway to the community, a place where new players can find the hub, and it positions him as one of the runners willing to do the unglamorous work of keeping information up to date.
His YouTube presence extends that teaching role. While the channel is built from migrated Twitch VODs and clipped highlights, the most watched uploads include his former world record runs and commentary driven Banjo content such as “A Rare Gem | Banjo-Kazooie” and character focused bits like “Mrs. Boggy’s Personality.” These videos give later viewers a preserved record of the routes that defined a particular era for the game.
Balancing College, Streaming and High Level Play
The “Speedrunning in College” feature places Azmi in a broader cultural moment. It describes him juggling five full year psychology courses, all delivered online due to the pandemic, while still devoting large blocks of time to routing and streaming Banjo. He talked there about how the game’s familiarity created room for creativity. Because he knew its mechanics so deeply, he could experiment with new ideas even when his schedule was constrained.
For historians of the medium, his story is one example of how speedrunning became a familiar part of student life in the 2010s and 2020s. The tools that enabled him to pursue both paths streaming platforms, Discord communities, shared routing documents are the same tools that reshaped gaming culture more broadly.
Legacy in the Banjo and Rareware Communities
By the mid 2020s, many of Azmi’s best times had been surpassed, as is always the case in an active game. But the record of his work remains important. He was one of the runners who bridged several stages of Banjo-Kazooie routing, from the early days of re consolidating records after leaderboard controversies to the MMM early skip era and beyond.
His former world records in Banjo-Kazooie Any percent and 100 percent FFM, his role in popularizing System Goose Overload, his podium runs in Rareware marathons and his published technical guides all point in the same direction. Azmi belongs in any serious Speedrun Legacy Profile series as one of the technicians who did more than chase times. He helped turn a beloved platformer into a sustained laboratory for movement, routing and community knowledge, leaving behind routes and resources that later runners still build upon.