Prototype: RPG from 300+ podcast transcripts
Ben Shih prototyped an RPG by turning over 300 podcast transcripts into a mapped game flow using Miro for visual organization and a product‑requirements‑document structure. The thread presents a concrete cross‑format case study on repurposing serialized audio content into interactive narrative design. (x.com)
A product designer at Miro took more than 300 podcast transcripts and turned them into a browser game where you battle podcast guests with product trivia instead of monsters. The project is called LennyRPG, and Lenny Rachitsky featured it in a March 18, 2026 episode explaining how Ben Shih built it. (youtube.com, listennotes.com) The raw material was unusually large and unusually clean. Lenny’s data site says paid subscribers can access 293 podcast transcripts in plain Markdown, while free users get a starter pack with 50 episodes, which gave Shih a ready-made archive to mine. (lennysdata.com, github.com) Shih did not start by writing code. In the episode notes, he says he used a six-step workflow that began with sketching the game and having artificial intelligence interview him so the product requirements document could be generated from spoken answers instead of a blank page. (youtube.com) That product requirements document mattered because a role-playing game needs structure before it needs art. A podcast archive is a giant pile of conversations, but a game needs towns, battles, rewards, and a reason to keep moving forward. (youtube.com) Miro became the map for that structure. The original social post describes Shih using Miro to organize the flow visually, which is a practical way to turn hundreds of separate interviews into something closer to a subway map with routes, stops, and branches. (x.com) The game format he chose was deliberately familiar. Multiple descriptions of the project call it a Pokémon-style role-playing game, which means the transcripts were not just summarized into notes but converted into characters, encounters, and quiz-like battles. (youtube.com, listennotes.com) That choice solves a hard adaptation problem. A podcast is linear, with one episode after another, but a role-playing game lets the player learn by walking around, meeting people out of order, and getting tested on what they remember. (youtube.com) The build was also a case study in how much of software work has shifted from typing to orchestrating tools. The episode notes list Phaser 3, RPG-JS, Supabase, OpenGameArt, and Claude Code among the pieces used to go from idea to shipped prototype. (youtube.com) Lenny paired the story with a bigger release on March 17, 2026. His newsletter post says he opened up his newsletter archive and podcast transcripts in artificial-intelligence-friendly Markdown files, alongside a Model Context Protocol server and a GitHub repository, specifically so other people could build their own projects on top of the archive. (emailshot.io, lennysdata.com) So the story is not just that one designer made one clever game. It is that a serialized audio archive became a playable system once somebody treated transcripts like game data, used a product requirements document as the rulebook, and used a whiteboard like Miro as the world map. (x.com, youtube.com)
