Was the VM a failure?

[oshfdk]

No, I was addressing a more abstract idea regarding the creation process of the VM.
From an evolutionary perspective, success = survival + reproduction. 

If we take this at face value, the VM itself has survived and probably is in the top 10 of the most reproduced medieval codices.

If you mean specifically the encoding, we don't know much about it, so it's quite possible it was popular and some of the principles may still be used in cryptography.

The only thing that definitely didn't get much traction was the script.