Blue Castle, the developers of Dead Rising 2, are hoping to fill the game with the most characters on-screen simultaneously in any game ever - a whopping 6,000 undead at once.

If you ever played Dead Rising, you know that one of the game's claims to fame was the staggeringly huge horde of zombies that protagonist Frank West had to massacre his way through using everything at his disposal (well, in the Xbox 360 version, anyway). Dead Rising 2 aims to top the mark set by its predecessor, according to Blue Castle's character art lead, Izmeth Siddeek.

"Dead Rising 2 deal[s] with the rendering of the greatest number of characters ever seen in a video game," Sideek said at last week's Game Developer's Conference. "Everything else needed to be subordinated to this requirement."

The massive zombie flood is made possible by software called Mental Mill, which allows Blue Castle to efficiently render tons and tons of zombies at once without sacrificing graphical fidelity (no word on how it'll affect frame rate, though). In a sidenote to Siddeek's presentation, Mental Mill's product manager Laura Scholl told attendees that the Dead Rising 2 team was preparing to fill their casino of the damned with enough zombies to have 6,000 on screen at once. That's a lot of zombies.

An interesting side note - while writing this news post, I almost mistakenly called Frank West "Adam West." Upon reflection, a videogame featuring Adam West slaughtering zombies would potentially be the best game ever, no?

(Via MTV Multiplayer)