It was ugly as shit.
And half the puzzles were hamerd by Sierra's method of nonsense, but you could karate the stuff away, so none cared that much.
Sodespite the ugly look, the crappy control, the bogus puzzles, it still warned its name. If for nothing else, you could pass it w/o puzzle-solving, and the puzzles made sense at least when you retroengineered them.
It lacked bugs to be honest, and the controls proved not to be gamebreaking (unlike for AitD 3), and time proved 3D to not just be a waste of time from the developers, so duh, that's likely it got famous.