Fate started as a hack of the Fudge system circa 2000, a culmination of a few fevered conversations Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue had about what they might do to run another Amber game. The versions that arose between then and 2005 were free, digital, and released to the Fudge community online to a surprisingly enthusiastic reception. These spanned from “Fate Zero” up to Fate 2.0.

Then, Jim Butcher offered them a chance to create an RPG based on the Dresden Files, triggering the establishment of Evil Hat as a company and a new take on the Fate system, first seen in Spirit of the Century (2006) and eventually The Dresden Files RPG (2010). The version of Fate found in both those (and thanks to open licensing, a number of others) was Fate 3.0.

The effort to extract the system (by Leonard Balsera and Ryan Macklin) to present it on its own led to many improvements, and that gave us Fate Core.