In the middle years of Banjo Tooie speedrunning, when most discussion still revolved around the original Nintendo 64 release, a runner from New Jersey quietly made the Xbox 360 port his entire world. Under the name JustAMoose, he has turned a version once treated as a curiosity into a fully charted, world record proven speedrun platform, pushing both full-game and category times to a level that demands respect alongside the N64 records.
Today, his name sits at the top of Banjo Tooie’s Xbox leaderboards in multiple categories. He holds first place in Any% and Any% No Bitclips on Xbox with identical 39 minute 52 second runs and carries the 100% Xbox world record with a 4 hour 15 minute 38 second route that he still critiques as improvable.
This profile traces how a single-game specialist helped define what Banjo Tooie looks like on a modern console and what his work means for the game’s future.
Finding A Home In Banjo Tooie
When JustAMoose joined speedrun.com in the early 2020s, he did not spread his attention across a dozen games. His profile shows one title and one title only: Banjo Tooie. He uses he/him pronouns, lists New Jersey as home, and links out to his Twitch channel under the name JustABlueMoose along with a YouTube channel where he archives runs and glitch demonstrations.
Long before his name appeared on the boards, the community had been debating whether the Xbox and Rare Replay versions of Banjo Tooie would ever be competitive. In a forum thread asking if the 360 / Rare Replay releases could be used for serious runs, veteran runners weighed loading times, text speeds, and glitch differences. One reply summed up the hesitation and the challenge: the versions might be close in timing for 100 percent, but “we are still waiting for someone to take the plunge and actually learn the run.”
Within a few years, that “someone” would be JustAMoose. His early full-game records on Xbox in the 100 percent category show a runner feeling out a new platform and slowly carving minutes away. A 4 hour 45 minute 54 second 100 percent run submitted about four years ago serves as an early benchmark. About a year later he posted a 4 hour 38 minute 9 second time, shaving more than seven minutes off his own work and confirming that the port had real competitive potential.
By the time he set his current 4:15:38 world record roughly nine months ago, that initial “plunge” had become something much larger: a sustained, methodical campaign against the Xbox version’s full length.
Building A 100 Percent World Record On Xbox
The 4:15:38 100 percent run is the clearest statement of what JustAMoose has tried to accomplish. On the leaderboard it is credited as a first place world record for the Xbox category with Jinjo manipulation enabled. In the description that accompanies the run, he breaks it down into simple pros and cons. Under cons he lists things like sloppy movement, rough early-game splits, and a few noticeable bonks. Under pros he highlights strong late-game segments and excellent RNG that help offset the mistakes.
It is an honest, working-runner assessment. He calls the run a huge personal best and admits he is satisfied with it for the moment, while also arguing that a 4:13 is clearly feasible with better play and that anything beyond that would probably require a major reroute or new timesave.
Taken together with his older 4:45 and 4:38 records, the 4:15 demonstrates how he has approached Banjo Tooie as a long-term project. Over roughly three years he cut just over half an hour from his own 100 percent path on the same console, transforming what began as an experiment into a fully optimized line that now defines the Xbox category for other runners.
Any%, No Bitclips, And The 39:52 Wall
While the 100 percent route represents endurance and routing discipline, JustAMoose’s Any% work on Xbox shows how he handles shorter, more intense categories. On the leaderboards he holds first place in both Any% and Any% No Bitclips for Xbox with the same 39 minute 52 second time.
The shared description on both records offers a glimpse into the reality behind that number. He notes that he lost several seconds to a rough Hag 1 fight, the final boss of the game, but describes the rest of the run as solid enough that he feels genuinely relieved to be done with the category.
In a category where a single missed input can erase a serious attempt, that mixture of relief and critique is typical of his style. The run may be world record level, but in his own notes he continues to point out specific areas where movement, boss execution, or menuing could still be tightened. To other runners, those comments are an implicit invitation. The time sets a high bar, and the description quietly maps where someone hoping to surpass it might try to improve.
Cheato% And Category Craftsmanship
One of the most revealing parts of JustAMoose’s career is his work in Cheato%, a shorter Banjo Tooie category centered on obtaining the Cheato pages. In an earlier generation of the leaderboard he posted a 34 minute 24 second Cheato% run on Xbox and declared himself satisfied enough to retire from the category, even as he noted a handful of mistakes and time losses setting up credits for DC Wing, a key late-game trick.
That retirement did not last. About a year later he returned to Cheato%, posted a new 34:01 time on Xbox, and claimed first place on the category’s board. He jokingly labeled the run “Dumb Strategies: The Run” in the description, a tongue-in-cheek way to describe the risk-heavy routing choices that helped him beat his own time by more than twenty seconds.
Cheato% is not the best known of Banjo Tooie’s categories, but it is one where creative routing and a deep knowledge of the game’s systems matter more than raw execution. By coming back to it after already stepping away, JustAMoose demonstrated both a willingness to revisit supposedly finished work and a broader commitment to shaping the full family of Banjo Tooie categories on Xbox, not just the flagship Any% and 100 percent runs.
Documenting Xbox-Only Glitches
If his records show what is possible inside Banjo Tooie’s rules, his glitch videos help explain those rules and the ways the Xbox version bends or breaks them. On his YouTube channel he has uploaded footage of Xbox-specific tricks under titles like “Banjo Tooie Glitch – Puzzle File Wiping (Xbox Only)” and “Banjo Tooie Glitch – Puzzle Storage (Xbox Only).” Both videos are explicitly framed as demonstrations of glitches that matter for “the speedrun leaderboards of this game,” signaling that they are aimed at other runners rather than a general audience.
Short experimental clips such as “First Jiggy?” hint at the same mindset on a smaller scale. Instead of polished highlight reels, these uploads capture the early testing and curiosity that goes into figuring out how a level, object, or camera behaves before that knowledge is folded into a serious route.
Because the Xbox release of Banjo Tooie differs from the N64 version in loading behavior, some text speed, and the way certain glitches behave or even fail to work, this kind of targeted documentation is essential. In a community that has historically focused more on the original hardware, runners who take the time to catalogue port-specific quirks effectively build a second rulebook. JustAMoose’s videos serve that role for tricks tied to puzzle storage, file handling, and category-relevant glitches that only make sense on the 360 and Rare Replay versions.
Standing In A Community Conversation
JustAMoose’s work cannot be separated from the broader Banjo Tooie community around him. The game’s speedrun.com page links to a shared Discord server and a central route document hosted on Google Docs, and the forums are filled with threads about optimal consoles, practice ROM issues, new glitch sightings, and requests for detailed setups of tricks like the Witchyworld bitclip.
In those discussions, moderators and long-time runners have repeatedly tried to balance N64 history with new platforms. When a player once asked whether the 360 and Rare Replay versions could be used in serious runs, the consensus was that loading and lag differences mostly evened out and that the community simply needed someone to put in the work on Xbox.
By the mid 2020s, JustAMoose had become one of the clearest answers to that call. His 100 percent, Any%, Any% No Bitclips, and Cheato% records all sit on the Xbox boards with first place times. In the game stats and recent runs that appear beneath forum threads, his name appears again and again, a reminder that someone did in fact “take the plunge” and push the port to its limits.
He has done this not as a moderator or category creator, but as a dedicated specialist whose play forces others to reckon with what the Xbox version can do. The time investment that once might have gone into branching out to other games has instead been poured back into Tooie itself, strengthening a single community rather than spreading his influence thin.
Legacy And The Shape Of Future Runs
Because the Banjo Tooie scene is still active, it would be premature to talk about JustAMoose’s legacy as something finished. At the time of writing he remains present on the leaderboards and online recently, with 51 full-game runs logged on speedrun.com, all in Banjo Tooie. His own notes on the 4:15:38 100 percent record insist that several more minutes can be cut with better execution and perhaps a significant reroute, and the same is likely true of his shorter categories.
Yet even if every one of his times is eventually surpassed, the shape of those improvements will bear his fingerprints. Future runners who choose the Xbox platform will study his routes, watch his glitch videos, and read his comments about what did and did not work in his world record attempts. The hours he describes as “sloppy” or “retire from the category” will become someone else’s foundation, just as early N64 records once supported the wider Banjo Kazooie series.
In that sense, JustAMoose’s legacy already extends beyond the numbers on the board. By dedicating himself so completely to a single game and a single platform, he has helped ensure that Banjo Tooie’s second life on Xbox is not just an afterthought, but a fully realized branch of the speedgame’s history, documented in world records, glitch research, and the quiet, persistent work of one runner from New Jersey.