In the 2020s history of Banjo Kazooie speedrunning, few names appear as often at the top of the leaderboards as Funderful. A 29 year old runner named Brett from Alberta in Canada, he built an audience on Twitch while grinding his favorite games, especially Minecraft and Banjo-Kazooie. On speedrun.com he has logged more than one hundred full game runs across multiple titles, with Banjo Kazooie on Nintendo 64 becoming the centerpiece of his career and the place where he secured world records in three of the four main N64 categories.
This Speedrun Legacy Profile traces Funderful’s path from Minecraft challenge categories to months long Banjo Kazooie grinds that reshaped the game’s record book on both original hardware and the modern PC port.
Early Streaming And Minecraft Roots
On his Twitch channel, Funderful introduces himself with a simple line that captures his approach: “Hey there, I am Funderful, but you can also call me Brett. I am a 29 year old from Alberta Canada. I mainly speedrun my favorite games, the most recent ones being Minecraft and Banjo Kazooie.” That description reflects the twin pillars of his work. Before his Banjo Kazooie breakthrough, he was already a regular in Minecraft’s speedrunning ecosystem, streaming long sessions focused on honing times in specific update versions and community challenge categories.
On speedrun.com his profile shows a long list of Minecraft submissions, including Random Seed Glitchless runs on various versions and a focus on “challenge mode” categories that emphasize survival under restrictive rules. One of the most notable achievements from this period is a “Half Heart Hardcore” Minecraft speedrun labeled as a world record on his Twitch highlights, where he finishes the game while never having more than half a heart of health. Runs like this illustrate the kind of problem he gravitates toward: long, unforgiving attempts where a small mistake wipes out significant time investment but also where incremental optimizations are constantly discovered and tested on stream.
Even before Banjo Kazooie took over his schedule, he experimented widely. His speedrun.com records show full game runs in titles such as Mirror’s Edge and Portal 2, along with entries in challenge style projects like “Ocarina of Time in Minecraft.” These games demand precise control of movement, camera, and routing under time pressure. That experience carried directly into the way he would later approach three dimensional platforming in Banjo Kazooie.
Turning Banjo Kazooie Into A Long Term Project
Banjo Kazooie is a 1998 platformer developed by Rare for the Nintendo 64, built around collecting musical notes and “Jiggies” across nine expansive worlds connected by the hub of Gruntilda’s Lair. When the game developed a mature speedrun scene, its leaderboards settled on several core categories for the N64 version: Any percent, Any percent Restricted, 100 percent with Furnace Fun Moves allowed, and 100 percent with Furnace Fun Moves banned.
“Furnace Fun Moves” refers to a powerful file manipulation glitch. In the vanilla game, the final quiz board called Furnace Fun temporarily gives the player access to every move in the move list. Runners discovered that by abusing this state and starting a new file, they could carry a nearly complete move set into a fresh game, which changes routing completely. In 100 percent FFM, those carried over moves are allowed, so the player completes the game fully but with highly optimized routes. In 100 percent No FFM, runners must earn their abilities in the intended way, which makes the category more straightforward in terms of glitches but still extremely demanding in execution.
By the early 2020s Funderful had shifted more of his streaming time to Banjo Kazooie. His speedrun.com history places him squarely in the upper tier of the N64 leaderboards, but beginning in 2024 his work moved from “top ten runner” to “record holder.” His first major landmark came in Nintendo 64 100 percent FFM. On July 3, 2024, he recorded a time of 1:56:29 with an in game time of 1:49:41, finally surpassing a world record that had held for roughly three years. In the run description he noted that this was his first time holding the record for the category and emphasized how much effort had gone into trimming seconds off his sum of best splits.
That breakthrough established him as the contemporary benchmark in the most technically demanding full completion category, where heavy glitch use and aggressive routing leave little room for error. It also set the tone for his next goals. Once he had proven that he could bring 100 percent FFM under the two hour mark, it was natural to look toward the other main categories.
Any Percent And The Push For A Sub 59
In parallel with his 100 percent work, Funderful became one of the key players in modern Any percent for Banjo Kazooie. Any percent allows more aggressive movement tricks and skips, and its record progression has often hinged on tiny route ideas that save only a few seconds. In mid 2025 community posts and social media updates documented a new Any percent world record time of 58:29 from Funderful on Nintendo 64, bringing the category into an era where sub 59 runs became standard reference points.
Because Any percent runs are shorter, they tend to receive more attempts on stream, which made this record particularly visible. Clips and highlight compilations circulated around the Banjo Kazooie community, and discussion threads dissected his route choices. In this phase of his career, viewers regularly bounced between his Minecraft streams and his Banjo streams, seeing the same runner apply similar patience and risk tolerance to completely different game engines.
The 100 Percent No FFM Grind
If 100 percent FFM showcased his ability to handle complex glitches and quick decision making, 100 percent No FFM became the category that best captured his long term persistence. No FFM runs still collect every Jiggy and note but must do so without the Furnace Fun Moves setup. With fewer major glitches available, the margin of error shifts toward consistent execution and small optimizations in movement.
On his YouTube channel and Twitch archives, Funderful documented a long return to 100 percent No FFM, posting personal best videos like a 2:00:01 run and teasing the possibility of finally breaking the two hour barrier. As his sum of best splits approached the mid 1:56 range, he began labeling streams as numbered grind days, a convention that allowed regular viewers to track how long the project had lasted. Community discussion threads reference specific “day” counts and describe the grind as having extended over many months.
In early 2026 that effort culminated in an N64 100 percent No FFM world record of 1:59:04 real time and 1:51:59 in game time. The official leaderboard lists him in first place with that time, ahead of long standing runners like ploathe and Azmi who had anchored the category for years. Achieving the record required sustained daily practice and incremental improvements rather than a single discovery, and the tone of the community response reflects that. Commenters on Banjo Kazooie community sites and social media called the run the payoff of an almost marathon like process of learning, refinement, and repeated attempts.
With that result, Funderful simultaneously held the world record in three of the four core N64 categories: 100 percent FFM, 100 percent No FFM, and Any percent. That combination underscored how completely he had come to define the top of Banjo Kazooie full game play on original hardware in the mid 2020s.
Banjo Recompiled And The PC Port Era
For many runners, mastery of the original console version would be the end of the story. Instead, Funderful moved quickly when a modern PC port of Banjo Kazooie, often referred to as Banjo Recompiled, became available to the public. Within hours of the release, a Reddit post in the Banjo Kazooie community documented that he had already tested the new port and completed a 100 percent No FFM run in the PC version. The post called it “the first 100 percent run done,” which made his 100 percent No FFM PC time the inaugural world record for that category on the new platform.
This early involvement in Banjo Recompiled shows how he approaches ports and remasters. Rather than treating them as separate curiosities, he treats them as new spaces for category definition, timing standards, and routing decisions. By trying 100 percent No FFM before other runners had posted times, he helped establish expectations for what a full completion PC run should look like and how it relates to the original N64 rules.
Moderation, Routing, And Community Work
Funderful’s impact is not limited to his own leaderboards. On speedrun.com he holds moderator roles for games like Edgecraft and 15 Seconds, which means he reviews submissions, enforces timing and rules decisions, and helps maintain the integrity of those spaces. That kind of behind the scenes labor is often invisible to casual viewers but vital for sustaining healthy speedrunning communities, especially in niche or challenge oriented titles.
In Banjo Kazooie specifically, his prominence on the leaderboards and his presence in community discussions place him among the runners whose choices influence how new competitors learn the game. When someone searches for modern full game examples or wants to see a complete route that reflects current best practices, there is a strong chance that they will land on one of his VODs or leaderboard entries.
His willingness to stream long grind sessions also serves a historical function. The archived runs show routing changes over time, small movement optimizations, and experimental strategies that did not always make it into final record attempts. For future historians of the game, those streams will provide a rich record of how a top level player interacts with Banjo Kazooie in real time, both when things go right and when they fall apart.
Streaming Persona And Place In Speedrunning History
Viewed from the outside, Funderful’s career embodies a particular modern model of speedrunning. He is neither tied to a single franchise nor constantly switching games for variety. Instead he alternates between a few favorite titles such as Minecraft and Banjo Kazooie, building depth in each while bringing lessons from one into the other. His Twitch channel on Twitch and recorded runs on YouTube show an approachable on screen persona paired with a very high tolerance for repetition and incremental progress, traits that his viewers see as central to his appeal.
Within Banjo Kazooie, his 100 percent FFM and 100 percent No FFM records and his sub 59 Any percent time make him one of the defining runners of the mid 2020s era, alongside earlier names who shaped the game in previous decades. Within Minecraft and challenge categories like Half Heart Hardcore and Ocarina of Time in Minecraft, his runs demonstrate how expertise in one game can be translated into creative self imposed constraints in another.
As new runners inevitably surpass his times and as Banjo Recompiled continues to evolve, his records will become historical benchmarks. They capture a moment when a single runner held three of the four flagship N64 categories while also helping define new categories on a freshly released PC port. For the purposes of speedrun history, that combination of long form grind, platform spanning adaptation, and community involvement places Funderful as one of the key figures in the Banjo Kazooie story and a representative example of what it meant to be a dedicated speedrunner in the mid 2020s.