A long time ago (I was about 12 years old), in a place in the city where I live there was an Arcade place, I remember that there were a lot of machines and I remember that there was one in particular where there was a certain queue and that was about this Die Hard game. I only played it once and I didn't like it, maybe it was too small for the gameplay but the truth was that I played it only once and that was it. I didn't want to play it anymore.
What I did understand is that I didn't understand how there were so many people queuing up and spending so much money in tokens to play this game.
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Probably it was popular for teenagers and older folks because it had the Die Hard name attached to it - arguably people that were intrigued to see the name of a movie they must have watched around that time being in the arcades to play with. In that regard, it makes a lot of sense that people flocked around it...although it certainly it isn't the most polished beat-em-up you could get your hands on the very first time [Streets of Rage 2 is probably still the most solid retro beat-em-up ever made by SEGA].
On the other hand, if you want to talk about people queueing up on games that didn't seem or didn't actually happen to be of great quality beyond the way they looked and sounded at the time, remember that Midway's Pit Fighter, even if nowadays it does look really janky, was a cash printer in arcades as people apparently went to play it a lot...perhaps due to the digitized sprites that were done years before they ended up making Mortal Kombat.
Although the worst part you could get from such case is to buy an even worse port of an already janky game [The game would already look less impressive in the Genesis...but if you had the SNES version, then you were stuck with a complete mess]- or if you are a home owner and still were able to get a home perfect port, the idea that you may have paid full price for something that doesn't quite add up to the hype at home [and the price] must be pretty sour.
It is what triverse was mentioning in his comment on this post [the detail about arcade-to-home ports with little to no extra modes costing full price like AAA games do today...and in this game's case the Saturn port doesn't even have ANY difficulty settings nor extras- just the game and a minigame], and in that regard, it does sound like quite a feeling to go through.
There was a PS2 remake of this game with remade graphics that included an Easy Mode, a Saturn visuals mode and two extra modes which was apparently a cheaper release, but was exclusive to Japan. It is kind of weird but maybe understandable in hindsight how SEGA had released a bunch of standalone arcade titles in Japan for the PS2, and while 9 of those SEGA Ages releases made it as a collection overseas, the rest of ports were stuck as import-only.
TL;DR: Probably the same that can happen with some games today: Big recognizable name, graphics that impress people [DHA's probably did at the time] and people just willing to shell as much as possible to go through the game they saw as a really cool game.
If that hadn't worked back in the day, then stuff like microtranscations appearing in the 2010s and Sony pushing out a solely visual-fidelity-focused hardware upgrade in the form of the 700+ dollar priced PS5 Pro...but as you know now, those did 😅
Thanks for reading and for your comment :]