Fred Hicks had been working with Lydia Leong, Rob Donoghue, and others to run LARPs at AmberCon NorthWest starting in 1999, and came up with the name Evil Hat for themselves.

[1]: 421  Hicks and Donoghue began work on the licensed Dresden Files Roleplaying Game in 2004, but publication was held up because they decided to use Spirit of the Century (2006) to introduce the Fate 3.0 system instead.

[4] In January 2016, Evil Hat Productions announced print-runs for some of its Fate Core System games such as[5] Venture City (2014)[6] and Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple (2011).

[7] The company then announced in September 2016 that they would be bringing both Blades in the Dark (2017) and Karthun: Lands of Conflict (2017) to trade in 2017; both games were funded via successful Kickstarter campaigns in 2015 and 2014, respectively.

[8] In October 2018, ICv2 reported that Evil Hat was scaling back with "a total of a dozen projects [...] postponed or cut in the immediate future" along with staff reductions such as the Head of Marketing Carrie Harris and the Head of Business Development Chris Hanrahan leaving that month and Senior Art Director Brian Patterson being laid off "at the end of 2018".

Only one month, October 2018, dipped below the highest interest level we saw immediately following release in 2015, and was promptly followed by November 2018 where we saw our strongest sales-month ever for the product (possibly due to retailers stocking up for the holiday gifting season)".

Honesty and openness about business realities, and excitement and perfectionism about game possibilities, built the Evil Hat audience from a corner of the Internet to a loyal horde numbering in the tens of thousands.

In 2013, Evil Hat hit both its design goals and its deadlines with Fate Core: five books Kickstarted, printed, and delivered, and over 60,000 copies sold.