Why are you committed to being worried whether gamers are cool or not? Companies will make and manufacture brands, products and commercials as fast as they can afford, trying everything, referencing anything even vaguely recognizable to sell a product.

Gamers have been worth millions and millions since the late 1970s. Do you recall the literately dozens of Saturday morning and after-school cartoons based on videogame characters? Or how E3 quickly because Las Vegas with bigger screens?

Companies will try anything for a while, then crapcan it at the first opportunity if profits aren't up.

The existence of a commercial referencing a thing does not make anyone, any subculture, or any idea "cool".

I think this advertising campaign is focusing on "retro-gaming" moreso than contemporary gaming.

I'm no expert on pop culture, but it seems like retro-gaming is cool for the same reason that old schoolhouse rock songs were cool several years ago; it's the nostalgia that's cool, not so much the gaming. It's part of why a t-shirt with the Atari logo on it is cool, but a shirt with the Xbox logo on it isn't.

A lot of twentysomethings I know, for instance, would be more likely to recognize Mike Tyson's Punchout than they would recognize Half-Life, because they don't actually *play* games anymore--they just remember the games they played when they were a kid. Besides, a promotional game imitating a contemporary game like Half-Life would be interpreted, at best, as a cheap marketing ploy or a product tie-in; but making a game that imitates a game that's 20 years old connects something a person values--their long-forgotten childhood--with the product being promoted.