The Hareraiser duology was created by Dugald Thompson and his business partner John Guard after Thompson (under the pseudonym Ken Thomas) won a 1982 armchair treasure hunt revolving around the Kit Williams book Masquerade. Williams had buried a golden hare pendant in a secret location in the United Kingdom (Ampthill Park, Bedfordshire, England), and hid clues throughout the book's elaborate illustrations. Thompson claimed the Hareraiser games served as an additional two-part armchair treasure hunt; the first person to buy and solve the clues in both games would win the Masquerade pendant on the box art as the grand prize.

However, in 1988, it was discovered that Thompson and Guard had cheated in the Masquerade hunt by using Guard's personal connections to approximate the pendant's location, and then stole a sketch of the area from Mike Barker and John Rousseau, two physics teachers who had solved Masquerade's clues, but failed to find the treasure after searching with metal detectors. Thompson then mailed the sketch to Williams, who was unaware of how it was acquired. Williams was shocked by the revelation, feeling that it tarnished Masquerade's reputation and felt "a deep sense of responsibility" to everyone who was genuinely looking for it, driving him into a reclusive retirement. The Hareraiser games were widely re-evaluated as a scam, with its clues being meaningless so that Thompson would never have to give away the pendant, but in an ironic twist, Thompson was forced to auction it off for £31,900 to recoup his losses when the Hareraiser games flopped. Williams was later reunited with the pendant during a 2009 BBC Four documentary.