Upon its original release, Resident Evil 4 was nothing short of a revelation for the beloved horror series. Combining pinpoint moment-to-moment action with some of the best set pieces and boss fights of the 2000s, RE4 deserves its reputation as one of the greatest action games of all time. With Capcom's impressive remake coming out this year, the original is still kept relevant thanks in part to the fan-made Resident Evil 4 HD Project, a mod that updates the look and feel of the game to modern standards. It's one of the most impressive video game fan works of all time, and it's all thanks to a small team of dedicated hackers who literally traveled the globe to accomplish their goals.

Albert Marin Garau is a longtime Resident Evil fan who dabbles in game modding. Over the years, he made a hobby out of collecting assets that had appeared in many of the series' best entries, including music tracks, textures, and pre-rendered backgrounds. He created repositories of these assets primarily for his own amusement. When he started working on RE4, he realized that many of the game's textures were blurry and low-resolution. However, it wasn't until the first PC port of the game came out that he realized he could simply rip the images from the game. In fact, he could even modify them himself. Now his library had a practical use.

"When the first RE4 port came out in 2007, I was really impressed with how moddable the game was," Marin Garau tells GameSpot. "The textures were simple TGA images, which meant I could move from compiling game assets to improving them. I created a texture pack for the game, which obviously pales in comparison to the HD Project."