Friday, February 08, 2008

Jade Raymond




In the video game industry, developers and designers are rarely known and even more rarely seen. it is a rare and special case when one comes into the spotlight giving a name to a face. Game Producer Jade Raymond is one of those cases. Jade Raymond a video game producer in an industry dominated by men, she is truly an inspiration and she breaks the mold of what peole think a game developer is.
Jade Raymond was born in Montreal Canada. She attended the Marianopolis private college in Downtown Montreal and after spending one whole summer playing video games it became pretty clear for her that she had not only to play them, but to make them.
As a teenager, she did night shifts working as a hospital switchboard operator. Part of her job involved calling "Code-Green" or "Code-Red" over the loud speaker and paging hospital staff when there were emergencies.
She later studied computer science at the McGill University in Montreal, and after graduating college with a degree in, Jade's first job was programming games at Sony. While at Sony, she founded the first Research and Development group within Sony Online. Her team was responsible for leveraging Sony IP across multiple platforms and ultimately building Sony Online's most trafficked offerings: the entire suite of Jeopardy games played by over 3,000 simultaneous users on a daily basis.
With a specialty in creating and designing online games, Jade began work at EA as a producer and went on to be the Producer behind one of EA's most popular online games to date, The Sims Online. She was directly responsible for all design and implementation of online game features and content for EA's highest revenue generating wholly owned property.
After seven years of working in New York and San Francisco she moved back to Montreal, her hometown, to make games at the world acclaimed Ubisoft Montreal Studio.
She is currently the producer of the highly anticipated title Assassins Creed, one of the most buzzed-about titles of 2007. As a video game producer, she is in charge of overseeing the development of the game regarding the creative and technical development of the game as well as maintaining schedules and budgets. She is also acting as a liaison between the development staff and the publisher or executive staff insuring the game will be delivered in time.
Her biggest break came at the 2003 Game Developer Award's Ceremony where she was one of the presenters. After the ceremony, Victor Lucas, the co-host and executive producer of the popular G4 TechTV's show called The Electric Playground came up to her and asked her to join the crew along with Tommy Tallarico, Julie Stoffer and Geoff Keighley. Although she never thought that I would be doing tv, she said it's a lot of fun and liked her experience very much. Because of this, Jade is now known to game fans throughout the world. As a result, she also gets to help out other game designers and producers by interviewing them for the show, which allows fans to put faces with names.
Once a person behind the scenes, Jade Raymond has advanced to a level many in the gaming community never see. Her appearances during gaming conventions such as E3 and X06 have made her popular amongst gaming fans. And while she is enjoying the fame that come with being on television, she still finds time to do what she loves most: Make video games.
She played Everquest 10 hours every day for three months when it came out. Her favorite video games of all time is Resident Evil 4, but liked alot Prince of Persia Sands of Time, Tekken 3, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, PaRappa the Rappa, Intelligent Cube and Incredible Crisis. She is currently playing Loco Roco on her PSP and has a weak spot for any game that involves monkeys, peculiar Japanese names or Zombies.

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