SXSW: Toronto videogame queen Jade Raymond won’t reveal secrets

Or pixels and bleeps, to put it more accurately. The 38-year-old game designer and managing director of Ubisoft Toronto – as close to a bona fide celebrity as gaming peeps get and a rare recognizable female face in an industry that’s very much still a boys’ club – drew a sizeable crowd away from the nearby SXSW Gaming Expo for her fireside chat with Spike TV host Geoff Keighley at Austin’s Long Centre and coyly promised them a sneak preview of what’s going on inside the software company’s recently expanded space in the Junction. Alas, all the potentially revealing sights and sounds in the video tour of the office were completely pixelated and bleeped out to admittedly humorous, but ultimately maddening effect.

No one left any the wiser as to what’s up at Ubisoft Toronto, only that there are five titles being developed there right now and that two of them are co-productions with other gaming studios. Continue your wild speculation, gamers.

“There are definitely a lot of plates spinning,” confirmed Raymond, best known for producing the wildly popular Assassin’s Creed series for Ubisoft’s Montreal office. “None of them have been announced.”

The room did get some insight into what Ubisoft’s future might hold in a more general sense. More blockbuster, “triple-A” franchises tied in with movies and comic books and the like are definitely on the way to follow films already in development based on such Ubisoft titles as Splinter Cell, Assassin’s Creed and the forthcoming Watch Dogs – although Raymond, acknowledging that the history of game-to-movie/movie-to-game crossovers is a horrendously spotty one, promised that the studio’s focus will remain where it should despite the growing move to “transmedia” properties.

“Our business is making games, so we have to make sure we’re making good games, first and foremost,” she said. “I don’t think we can think out the gate, ‘How is this going to be a good movie?’ I don’t know anything about movies. I’ve never made a movie in my life.”

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