Ok, everyone! I'll need a headcount! One, two, three, fo-- gods dammit,
could everyone please stand still and not eat each other for five seconds?!

Ever since we finally got confirmation of Dead Rising 2, we never really had much news for it. That's ok though since the Blue Castle devs showed up in the GDC.

There, they discussed the technology behind their upcoming zomebie game, with character art lead Izmeth Siddeek saying that they're taking great effort to push the barriers of rendering huge numbers of objects on-screen at a given time.

Dead Rising 2 deal[s] with the rendering of the greatest number of characters ever seen in a video game. Everything else needed to be subordinated to this requirement.

Greatest number of characters, eh? And how high is this goal of theirs? No, they're not taking it to over nine thousand, but Vegeta got it close. Blue Castle is going for 6000 zombies, if Laura Scholl is to be believed.

See, Blue Castle is using the Mental Mill software to render the characters in the game. Laura Scholl is the product manager of Mental Mill. And in her GDC presentation, she let slip that Siddeek once told her that the Dead Rising 2 team is "preparing to have as much as 6000 characters on screen" (quote from MTV Multiplayer).

Now, of course, Scholl isn't actually part of the dev team - she's just the provider of the Mental Mill software. It could be possible that this 6000 figure is either an exaggeration or a simple figurative estimate. By no means did anyone (either of Blue Castle or of Mental Mill) confirm if this number was accurate.

Capcom's Dead Rising 2 for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC is currently on a TBA status for its release date.

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