Bob missed the great era of home computing; the days of soldering together your own pirated Apple-II, the whiz-kid with the Imsai or Vector Graphics machine with a terminal, 8" floppy drive and paper tape printer so you could share software, 300 baud accoustic coupler modems - my era.
So, he probably constructed this mental fantasy where the mcdonalds meal level consumer product that was the Nintendo somehow was underground and indie like Chicago industrial music in the mid 80s or something, and because it's in a book, for crying out loud (granted, one he wrote) that makes it a fact. So like the mall kid who bought a copy of Nirvana's Nevermind on release day because Spin magazine said it was going to be big, and they believed that they were at the forefront of the grunge movement, Bob thinks his Consoomerism (is that how to write it?) means he rode some edge of the wave playing Mario Brothers.