Rise of Nations soundtrack is fantastic sandis the only “video game music” that I semi-regularly listen to.
Especially check out “High Strung” that would always play in multiplayer whenever a player dropped a nuke on another player.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL829D6AF91A5C465E&si=yvPeVG9kuDx71mZb
Yeah, except my experience, it was in a team speak server, smoking cigarettes over a game of unreal or quake 3 instead of a 3" diameter cigar over a game of chess. Spiritually and effectively the same as in those old biographies though.
For reference, this was at a midsized state university in the south in the early 2010s