Tianli

Founded: 1996

Headquarters:

Guangdong, China

Xin Tianli Electronics Ltd. (新天利电子有限公司), more commonly known by their brand name Tianli (新天利) was a Chinese consumer electronics company specialising in VCD, and later DVD players.

Hardware Produced

Sega Enterprises, which distributed it's gaming consoles on the Chinese market from late 1980s, wanted to offer something new that would interest the average customer who does not want to spend money on expensive console. They found that CD players would be good additional feature to do this especially due to the high popularity of this format in Asia. In January 1998, Sega began promoting in China special version of the Sega Saturn with a built-in VCD player.

In October 1998 Sega and Tianli announced that they had formed a strategic alliance to develop gaming and entertainment products for the Chinese market, with Tianli gaining distribution rights for the People's Republic of China, which was essentially a VCD player with Sega Mega Drive hardware built in. The first "Game VCD Players" launched that year, with many different models seeing release over the next few years. The unique concept of the Game VCD was that instead of games being distributed on cartridge, games were on CD, with many different roms stored on each one.

Original VCD players always had seal on the back saying - UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA PRODUCED BY U.M.C. (consoles were produced in Taiwan by United Microelectronics Corporation), while DVD players have Manufactured under license from Dolby Laboratories . Original games after start had title screen saying - PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD^[1].

Whole iniciative got mixed results. The system was well-known and recognizable, helped Tianli with growth of it's market position but the price of device was high (¥1799^[2]) and idea was quickly catch up by national producers which released clones, starting from next year. Due to that fact few brands received authorization from Tianli and UMC for sale after negotiations, but at some point customers could no longer tell whether the system was original, authorized or copied^[3]. The whole concept of CDs with multiple games wasn't as good as Sega thought, due to pirates selling cheaper and larger compilations.

In June 2000, the video game consoles were banned in China, but these restrictions didn't mentioned "Game Players", which allowed them to be still on the market in early 2000s.

Certificate from Sega Enterprises to Tianli archived from Tianli's defunct website

Tianli Promotional Video

Mega Drive VCD Players

Mega Drive DVD Players

Accessories for Mega Drive Players

List of games

Main article: List of Mega Drive VCD/DVD games.

References

[1] ttps://web.archive.org/web/20010509093453/http://www.xintianli.com.cn/copyriht.htm

[2] ttps://bbs.hupu.com/55593248.html

[3] ttps://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/565585911

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