I beat Riven for the first time last night and recommended it and a friend asked me where she could buy it for OS X. Without thinking to check I said GOG... but it turns out that they don't actually offer an OS X version for whatever reason even though the game has been released for Apple systems in at least three forms. Further investigation makes it seem like you need the original on-disc version to play, and even then you have to essentially run it in a virtual machine anyway... but many OS X machines come without disc drives by design, and all of that's not really much easier than simply running Windows (or a Windows-like environment) anyway.

Is there really no legal way to download and play Riven on OS X without essentially also running an emulator? If not, why hasn't GOG tapped that market yet? Are they at least working on it?

The simple problem is that you'd basically have to rewrite Riven to account for the massive transition between architecture or use an emulator/interpreter, and that would not be easily accomplished either.

At least, that's what I speculate what the problem is, as Riven was made well before the transition, back in 1997.

As far as I know, there is no OSX version of Riven. OSX is a completely different operating system than the old MacOS that Macs were running in 1997. Since then there's been the transition to OSX, which is actually related to Unix and has nothing to do with the old OS and there's been the architecture change from PowerPC to x86/x64. So your modern Mac has virtually nothing in common with the Macs of 1997.

In fact, for playing on a modern Mac it's probably easier to install Windows XP on a virtual machine and install GOG's windows version on that than if is to set up a Mac emulator. As for why GOG hasn't tapped into that market, it's likely because they can't licence the OS. Whether they were trying to emulate the Windows version on OSX or the Mac version on OSX, either way they'd have to licence Windows from MS or MacOS from Apple for it to be legal. Don't hold your breath.

You can use RivenX to run it in OS X. It requires the data files to play.
[url=]http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/49024/riven-x[/url]

It was never quite finished so it's technically in beta, but when I used it it worked just fine. That was a few OS X releases ago.