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.

Promotional material

Tianli Promotional Video

Hardware Produced

In October of 1998 Sega Enterprises 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. In order to differentiate their VCD players from their competitors Tianli came up with the concept of the "Game VCD Player", 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 distributed on CD, with many different game roms stored on each CD.

Original VCD/DVD 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) and 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.

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

Mega Drive VCD Players

Mega Drive DVD Players

Accessories

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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