A recent study has shown that a reference to the James Joyce novel Ulysses, considered by many to be one of the most important works in Modernist literature, went over the heads of over one million gamers playing the video game Dead Rising, considered by many to be the least important zombie-killing game of the year.

The easter egg, which can be found in the back section of the toy store, is a fake advertisement for Dedalus Rising, and shows an image of imaginary Dubliner and Joyce character Stephen Dedalus eating breakfast at the Martello Tower with a man who appears to be Buck Mulligan. A caption below reads, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Of course none of that means anything to those of us who haven’t yet set a year aside to read that particular book and have no such plans to do so in the near future.

Keiji Inafune, producer of Dead Rising, finds it troubling that no one is calling attention to what he considers “a delightful easter egg.” Calling from in his office at Capcom after reading the study, Mr. Inafune told Hardcasual, “[One of the things] I wanted to do with Dead Rising was take a comic approach to an old genre. Since this is a sandbox game, we knew that the player was going to explore every inch of the mall, so we made sure that there were plenty of funny and satirical things to check out. I have to say that the biggest influence on the game was the original satirical/parody/sandbox novel, Ulysses.”

“Of course,” Mr. Inafune added, “the joy of an easter egg is not everyone is going to find and appreciate it. I mean, no one has mentioned seeing my very clever reference to Coast of Utopia.”