This post is a short overview of my work over the past 18 months, and how I ultimately discovered something very special.
Over the last few years, many Jakks Pacific Plug & Play consoles were dumped thanks to the work of Sean Riddle. A number of these could be accessed via the GameKey port—a cartridge interface that allowed certain consoles to be expanded with additional games by purchasing dedicated cartridges.
However, not all consoles were easy to work with. Some of the Jakks Pacific systems had no straightforward way to dump their ROMs. The ROM chip was hidden under a glob top, making it very difficult to identify the individual lines coming out of it. On top of that, physically connecting to those extremely thin lines for dumping was a real challenge.
If you’ve been following the work of David Haywood (“Haze”) and myself in MAME over the past year and a half, you may have noticed that in late 2024 I found a method to dump these consoles using inexpensive equipment and materials. Even better, the process takes only about 2–3 hours per console. I’ll go into detail about this technique in a future blog post, as I’d like to document it thoroughly so others can replicate it.
Fast forward a few months to mid-2025: most of the remaining Jakks Pacific games had been successfully dumped and are now working in MAME. At this point, only a handful of first-generation Plug & Play consoles from 2003–2004 remain undumped. These systems don’t use any external ROM on the PCB—we believe they rely on MCUs with internal ROM, which currently cannot be accessed. We also know that some games had later revisions released, but those versions have not yet been found or acquired.
Now, back to the main topic. The GameKey system was not a commercial success for Jakks Pacific, and only a small number of cartridges were ever released. The entire GameKey initiative was discontinued after roughly a year.
Many consoles were advertised as “GameKey-ready,” promising future expansions that ultimately never materialized. A good example is the Winnie the Pooh: Piglet’s Special Day console. Across the internet, you’ll find claims that a GameKey for this system was in development but never released. The console itself includes a cartridge port and was clearly designed to support it. The GameKey was supposedly planned for release in 2006, yet all available sources insist it never came out:
But what if that assumption is wrong?
Two weeks ago, I came across an auction listing for a GameKey—not just one, but two. Both were in perfect condition and still sealed. I bought them immediately.
And yes—this is the missing GameKey for Winnie the Pooh: Piglet’s Special Day. It appears that it was actually released in Italy, but only in extremely small quantities. While the box art is entirely in Italian, the manual and all included games are fully in English.
It took me about an hour to build a GameKey dumper and extract the data. Haze has already added it to MAME, meaning that another previously unknown game has now been preserved—and will soon be playable by everyone in the next MAME release.
Enjoy some snaps from MAME:
