Transcripts turned into playable RPG

A designer at Miro took a pile of podcast transcripts and turned them into a game where you fight product leaders with trivia pulled from their own interviews. Ben Shih called it LennyRPG, and he built it after Lenny Rachitsky released a public transcript archive for his podcast. (github.com, youtube.com) The raw material was unusually big for a side project: the GitHub archive lists 269 episode transcripts, and Ben’s write-up describes processing more than 300 episodes into game data. That means the project was not based on one guest or one theme; it treated the whole podcast catalog like a world map and character database. (github.com, lennysnewsletter.com) Lenny Rachitsky’s archive was built to be searchable by artificial intelligence tools, not to be played like a game. The repository stores each episode with metadata like guest name, title, publish date, duration, and a full transcript, which gave Ben a clean source to turn spoken conversations into structured game content. (github.com) The finished project looks less like a transcript reader and more like an old handheld role-playing game. The public site describes it as a retro-style game where players battle guests from Lenny’s Podcast and answer product-management questions to level up. (lennyrpg.fun, youtube.com) Ben is not a full-time game engineer, and that is part of why the project spread. The YouTube description for his walkthrough identifies him as a non-technical designer at Miro and says he used a six-step workflow with artificial intelligence tools to go from sketch to shipped prototype. (youtube.com) That workflow mattered because transcript archives are usually dead storage. In most companies, a transcript sits in a folder like meeting notes in a drawer; Ben treated each interview like a card in a trading game, where the guest, ideas, and themes could be remixed into battles, prompts, and progression. (github.com, lennyrpg.fun) The Miro angle is not just where Ben works. Miro highlighted the project as an example of using its canvas as a place to map systems, which turns a whiteboard tool into a rough game-design table where story paths, characters, and mechanics can be arranged before code is finalized. (miro.com, x.com) Lenny’s ecosystem also helped the project travel fast once it existed. By March 17, 2026, Lenny’s Newsletter had published Ben’s piece explaining how he built LennyRPG, and a companion audio version broke out the exact steps, tools, and prompts he used. (lennysnewsletter.com, listennotes.com, youtube.com) What makes this story stick is that nothing new was recorded for the game. The novelty came from changing the container: long-form audio became a searchable archive, the archive became structured data, and the data became a playable prototype that doubles as a portfolio piece. (github.com, lennysnewsletter.com, lennyrpg.fun)