There are many physical factors affecting the development of cartilage tissue. Particularly, mechanical condition is an important aspect to culture cartilage tissue. The mechanical conditions in engineering cartilage tissue, such as compressive and shear force, fluid flow, hydrostatic pressure and tissue deformation or them partly combined, were reviewed. From the standpoint of bionics, the mechanical environments applied on tissue engineering should work in three aspects: providing adequately mechanical stimuli to the cells seeded in 3-D scaffold; ensuring the efficient mass-transport of the nutrients and waste products of the cells; promoting the development of functionally extracellular matrix in 3-D scaffold. The mechanical environments currently used only represent the part of mechanical conditions of in vivo articular cartilage. We concluded that rolling depression load may achieve the cultivation of functional cartilage constructs in vitro.