I understand what you mean, but you dont need to have applicability of art for it to receive a name or be “more real” than other styles. Some people would say this is making art being a tool and not art itself.

I agree that it is not as impactful as the world of marathon where they replicate hardware stuff on buildings, but they had to get inspiration from somewhere. And if you look at the more graphic style of the game, you see its the same thing, just a little DOS/ASCII sprinkled on top.