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

Gallery

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

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.

Whole iniciative got mixed results. The system was well-known and recognizable, helped Tianli with growth of market it's position but the price was high and idea was quickly catch up by national producers which released clones, starting from next year. The idea of CDs with multiple games wasn't as good as Sega thought, due to pirates selling cheaper and larger compilations.

Mega Drive VCD Players

Mega Drive DVD Players

List of games

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

References