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Here you read the unedited article.
This article was edited by Jim Schelberg and printed in the Pingame Journal issue #103, March 2004.
Like most of you I loved to play pinball as a teenager, especially the Indiana Jones pinball was my favorite. In August 2002 I could finally afford money and room for an IJ and a youth dream came true.
I used the internet to learn more about maintaining my IJ. During my searches I visited the "Lost Temple of DOHO" with its lost scenes (archived here), on the RGP newsgroup I read that DOHO is used as a synonym for easter eggs in Williams pinball machines, and that it is an acronym for "Documented Occurrence of Hidden Object" or "Discovery Of Hidden Object". This was all I knew about DOHO until January 2004.
As I'm a programmer, debugging and changing the IJ game ROM with PinMAME was fun and very interesting. In October 2003 I decided to mail Brian Eddy, the software coder of IJ, some questions about his experiences in pinball development as a coder. While researching his email address and other information related to him, I found some interviews at the Swedish Pinball Association homepage. I contacted one of the interviewers, Torbjörn Molander, to confirm Brian's email address and if he had some more questions for Brian in his mind. Torbjörn also maintains a list of DOHOs, this led me to ask Brian what DOHO really means. Brian avoided this question in his reply in January 2004. This aroused my interest in why DOHO was such a big secret.
I searched the RPG first and one post from 1995 striked me which mentioned the sighting of the text "CONGRATS SCOTT AND DOHO" on the display of a No Fear pinball.
A reply of Steve Ritchie stated that this is correct and it is indeed Scott and DOHO.
So DOHO had to be a person with some kind of relationship to someone named Scott.
To revise these posts I re-visited the Williams homepage to download the latest No Fear game ROM 2.3.
While downloading the ROM I remembered "The Lost Temple of DOHO" and found the name Scott "Matrix" on its front page.
In the No Fear ROM I also found the text "HI DOHO".
So DOHO is a person with some kind of relationship to Scott "Matrix".
A newsgroup search for posts by Scott "Matrix" showed that his last name is Slomiany and that he uses DOHO email addresses, but all posts with those DOHO addresses where from 1999 or later - long after his pinball carreer.
A websearch for his full name revealed that he uses those DOHO email addresses also in other, mostly programming related, forums.
Another striking hit of that search was the content description of Pingame Journal issue #039, April/May 1995, mentioning Scott's wedding.
Unfortunately no name of the bride was given and it could also be an April Fool's joke.
But the next fact I recognized is that everything of the discovered information happened in 1995: the RGP post and No Fear's ROM were from late 1995 and the wedding report was also from 1995, hence No Fear's "CONGRATS" has to refer to Scott's wedding.
So DOHO was/is Scott's girl-friend/wife for sure.
But what the hell does DOHO really stand for?
Hence I decided to investigate further on Scott and his wedding.
Again I did a websearch for his name, but this time I watched for everything family related.
I must admit that Scott didn't leave many private trails on the net, but he made a "mistake" by posting into a guestbook of Polynesian Adventures (Hawaii) and naming his wife's first name "Dorris".
Got you!
So after two hours of search, I knew that DOHO is Scott "Matrix" Slomiany's wife Dorris.
I believe that Scott started putting DOHO in easter eggs to pay homage to her. And as he put DOHO in all of his easter eggs it became a nickname for her at Williams. Hence DOHO could mean "DOrris HOmage", be her initials (with maiden name) or even be her real life nickname. For the people outside Williams it became the above mentioned synonym for an easter egg. I mailed my solution to Scott and asked him if he would be so nice to explain the meaning of HO to me.
The following days I searched for the PGJ issue #039 on the net, but to no avail.
I was told that I could order those old issues and so I did.
In the order I mentioned my interest in the article about Scott's wedding, hours later Jim of PGJ asked me why and I told him everything I found out.
Jim always wanted to get permission from Scott to print the real meaning of DOHO in his journal, and as I solved the mystery by myself, he finally got permission after several years of waiting.
Some days later the issue #039 arrived and on page 19 it stated Dorris' maiden name Ho, an oriental/asian name.
Mystery solved!
DOHO was/is Scott "Matrix" Slomiany's girl-friend/wife Dorris Ho (maiden name).
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