Jade Raymond leaps from behind a counter at the newly opened Ubisoft studio in Toronto, smiling widely. With her swishing dark hair and a name that sounds like a Japanese role-playing heroine, you half expect her to dual-wield a pair of Uzi sub-machine guns or cut your arm off with a sword. Instead, the 34-year-old managing director of Ubisoft Toronto is hosting a video tour of the spacious gaming lab.

It’s a massive warehouse space that will eventually house some 800 employees, but the place looks hollow and dark, like some mysterious level in the first-person shooter Half-Life or, more appropriately since it is a Ubisoft game, Splinter Cell.

Raymond has become a superstar of sorts. As the gaming industry continues to balloon – Rockstar Games’Grand Theft Auto IV alone hauled in $500m (€395m) worldwide in its first week – and overtake movies as the primary source of video entertainment, the most talented gaming gurus have gone from relative obscurity to instant name recognition. Raymond always draws a crowd at conventions like E3, held yearly in Los Angeles but now, as studio chief, her role has shifted to one of mentoring, financial scrutability, and creative inspiration for a large team. And, the new studio is not just a think tank or breeding ground: Raymond says it will develop the best and most auspicious games. The biggest challenge: figuring out how to take what has become the purview of eighth-grade Halo addicts, chewing gum and wearing Xbox headsets, into the realm of mass adoption and higher revenue.

Originally from Montreal, Raymond says she never set out to become the face of gaming, but she did have lofty ambitions. “I’m not one of those who stumbled into this,” she says, recalling how, as a pre-teen, she played games with her cousins and realised there must be a cottage industry for these programming wizards and artistic prodigies, even for the rudimentary games of the period.”Even when I was eight years old, I knew what I was going to do when I grew up; I was very ambitious,” she recalls.

Using an old Apple computer, Raymond programmed robots and games, quickly gravitating to the behind the scenes, bit-level work. She saw, at an early age, that games blend several disciplines – mathematics, science, art – and enrolled in an advanced education course in high school, later held an internship at both Microsoft and IBM, and landed her first job at Sony Online Entertainment, famous for making the EverQuest online franchise. Eventually, she worked as a producer on the wildly successful franchise Assassin’s Creed at Ubisoft.

During this time, her fanbase grew rapidly. One reason had to with her good looks, but gamers also quickly realised she had street cred – unlike the booth babes who were once used to hand out flyers at E3. (At recent gaming trade events, cleavage and high heels have given way to low-profile tech demos and free beer.) As a child, Raymond played obscure titles like Intelligent Cube for the PlayStation and Streets of Rage for the Sega Genesis. She’s known for preferring bloody fighting games and can talk smack with the most hardcore gamers.

In some ways, her counterpart is Stevie Case, the one-time gaming queen who now works at Live Gamer as a business development manager, but posed for Playboy in early 2000; Raymond herself ranks number 82 on the AskMen.com list of the top 99 most desirable women.

For Raymond, fame is part of the job, but she says there is a downside. “I always set out to be a programmer. I didn’t think I’d have a role where I would be out in the public, it was not something I signed up for,” she says. “There is a celebrity side, as games become more mainstream; you almost become a target like anyone in the media would. It is inevitable but I wish that was not the case.”

However, Raymond cedes that there are some upsides to fame: she was able to work on a popular franchise and raise the bar for story-based gaming. She also feels that she has inspired other women to break into the male-dominated industry. Still, after working on Assassin’s Creed around 2007, she took a step back from the public eye in order to refocus on the business side.

“Leading Assassin’s Creed, I was very career-focused,” she says. “I wanted to be part of something big. But during that time I went through a shift where I just wanted to make a great product, and to do that I needed to help other people develop their careers, so I went to more of a mentoring role.”

Raymond discovered an interesting business principal, one that could help advance the gaming industry. She discovered that it takes a creative team working together, not just one star, to create amazing games. She could only do so much as an individual to make a great product, but to take games further and increase revenues she says a better role for her is to build a framework work and an environment that inspires innovation.

Interestingly, the catalyst for this change is Google, headquartered in Mountain View, California – well outside of the gaming industry. The search giant has figured out how to inspire employees with free food, volleyball courts, and electric cars you can check out for the day for free. Game development companies have always been lax – employees can spend off hours in community areas “testing” competing games –but Raymond says she wants to go further and create an environment where employees love coming to work.

So far, she has hired 30 employees, one of whom is documenting the studio’s progress on Facebook. She has signed an agreement with the Canadian government that the studio will hire another 150 employees this year and 800 by 2020.

She says because the studio will work on the most high-profile games at Ubisoft – which employs 6,000 and is based in Paris – she is looking for only the elite gaming pros who can jump right into the thick of a mainstream project. “The next mark of my success will be in shipping the first great game out of this studio,” she says – inevitably, with a smile.