Twenty-one years ago, a small group of anime and gaming fans at Georgia Tech pooled their enthusiasm and pulled together a convention for roughly 700 people on campus. This Memorial Day weekend, that same event takes over more than one million square feet of the Georgia World Congress Center and is expected to bring in north of 60,000 attendees from across the country and beyond. MomoCon 2026 runs from Thursday, May 21 through Sunday, May 24, and what it represents in 2026 is something worth paying attention to, not just as a fan event, but as a genuine marker of where gaming culture has landed.
The name comes from “momo,” the Japanese word for peach, a nod to Georgia’s identity and the convention’s roots in Japanese animation fandom. But MomoCon has long since outgrown that origin story. It is now one of the most significant gaming and pop culture gatherings in the American South, and its 2026 edition is the largest the event has ever been.
A scale that demands attention
MomoCon 2026 is expanding to its largest footprint yet at the Georgia World Congress Center, expected to draw over 60,000 attendees and generate a $43 million economic impact to metro Atlanta. That number is not a typo. For context, that is a bigger economic footprint than many mid-tier music festivals that receive significantly more mainstream press coverage.
MomoCon 2026 will be in both Halls A and Hall B, increasing the total space to a massive 1,045,178 square feet for exhibits and gaming. To put that in perspective, the average NFL stadium floor is roughly 50,000 square feet. MomoCon in 2026 is running twenty of them, back to back, filled with cosplay, games, panels, figures, arcades, and competitive esports.
The 2026 convention is projected to generate $43 million in economic impact, benefiting hotels, restaurants, rideshare services, and local businesses throughout the weekend. The Omni Atlanta, Hilton Signia Downtown, and surrounding hotels fill up every year for this event, drawing attendees from across the US and internationally. This is not a regional curiosity. It is a significant cultural and economic force in one of America’s most active entertainment markets.
The gaming floor is the real story
For gamers specifically, MomoCon’s scale on the gaming side is what sets it apart from most conventions that use “gaming” as a secondary bullet point in their marketing.
MomoCon features the second-largest open game hall in the United States, spanning 250,000 plus square feet of continuous gaming, including classic arcade games, esports stages, PC and LAN gaming, console tournaments and freeplay, board and card gaming, RPGs, and LARP. That is a sustained, non-stop gaming environment that runs around the clock over the entire weekend. In an era where many conventions have scaled back their gaming floors in favor of celebrity-focused programming, MomoCon is going the other direction.
MomoCon will have 350,000 square feet for esports, digital gaming, and tabletop gaming demos and open play. The BYOC section, Bring Your Own Computer, is a dedicated LAN gaming area that draws a specific and passionate subset of the PC gaming community who want to spend the weekend gaming alongside thousands of other players in the same physical space. It is the kind of experience that streaming platforms and online lobbies genuinely cannot replicate.
More than 90,000 square feet are dedicated to tabletop games, board games, card games, role playing games, and miniatures, with instructors on hand to teach new games alongside the classics. For a generation of gamers who have grown up with both digital and analog play, that breadth is genuinely appealing.
Wonder festival lands in the US for the first time
The headline addition for 2026 is one that the collector and gaming communities have been paying close attention to. MomoCon 2026 will feature the US debut of Wonder Festival, a 50,000 square foot exhibit showcasing limited edition anime figures and collectibles.
Wonder Festival began in Japan and highlights the artistry behind collectible design and production, celebrating professional studios and independent creators who bring characters, creatures, and worlds to life through craftsmanship. Fans will discover new sculpts, meet artists, and celebrate the creative process behind figures, models, and garage kits that inspire collectors worldwide.
For the gaming and anime collector community in North America, this is a significant moment. Wonder Festival has historically been a Japan-only event that American fans followed through convention reports, import sites, and social media coverage. Having it debut on American soil at MomoCon is a cultural bridge that speaks to how seriously the convention takes its international audience, and how seriously Japanese creators are beginning to regard the North American collector market.
Critical role, 100 plus guests, and the voice acting dimension
Featured guests include the full cast of Critical Role, the hit show and media brand with 2.75 million YouTube subscribers, including co-founder and Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer, and cast members Travis Willingham, Laura Bailey, Marisha Ray, Taliesin Jaffe, Liam O’Brien, Sam Riegel, and Ashley Johnson.
Critical Role’s presence at MomoCon is a smart pairing. The cast spent years at the intersection of voice acting, tabletop gaming, and streaming culture, and their audience demographic overlaps almost exactly with MomoCon’s core attendee base. For fans of D&D, video game voice acting, and collaborative storytelling, getting the entire ensemble in one place for panels and autograph sessions is a meaningful draw.
MomoCon welcomes more than 100 special guests including voice actors, actors, game directors, animators, creators, streamers, YouTubers, and cosplayers, along with more than 500 panelists. That is a programming density that most conventions cannot touch, and it means that regardless of which corner of gaming or animation culture you care about most, there is almost certainly someone at MomoCon worth hearing from.
Why this matters beyond the numbers
MomoCon’s growth arc tells a story that the broader gaming industry should find interesting. The convention started in 2005 as a campus-level gathering rooted in niche hobby culture. In 2026, it is a $43 million economic event with an international guest list, a US-debut partnership with one of Japan’s most prestigious collector events, and a gaming floor that rivals dedicated esports arenas in scale.
That trajectory reflects something real about how gaming culture has matured. It is no longer a subculture that tolerates being minimized in mainstream spaces. It is a primary culture that draws massive, passionate, spending audiences, and cities and partners are paying attention. Atlanta specifically has become one of the most active gaming and entertainment convention cities in the US, with MomoCon sitting alongside DreamHack Atlanta as a signature weekend on the regional calendar.
MomoCon has become a signature Memorial Day weekend event for metro Atlanta’s hospitality industry. When a fan convention becomes load-bearing infrastructure for a major city’s hospitality sector, it has crossed into something genuinely significant.
Getting there and what it costs
For anyone considering making the trip, the logistics are straightforward. The Georgia World Congress Center is accessible via MARTA’s Blue and Green lines, and organizers strongly recommend using public transit due to Memorial Day weekend traffic and limited parking.
Four-day memberships are $110.28. Single days range from $63 to $81, with children 9 and under free. Game tournament registration and separate concert tickets are also available. VIP options include early hall entry, exclusive merchandise, and access to a private lounge with seating and charging stations. For a four-day event of this scale, the pricing is competitive with comparable conventions, and the gaming floor access alone justifies the entry cost for dedicated PC and tabletop players.
Registration is open now at the official MomoCon registration page, with standard mailed badge options already sold out and on-site pickup as the remaining option for new registrations.
The broader picture
What MomoCon represents in 2026 is a convention that has resisted the temptation to chase broad pop culture at the expense of its core identity. There was never an attempt to become Comic-Con. The gaming floor stayed intact rather than shrinking to make room for more celebrity photo ops. Instead, the organizers doubled down on animation, gaming, comics, and cosplay, and grew by being genuinely better at those specific things rather than broader.
That focused identity is exactly what its audience has rewarded. Sixty thousand people do not descend on Atlanta Memorial Day weekend by accident. They come because MomoCon has earned a reputation for delivering on its specific promises year after year, and because the gaming and animation communities have found in it a physical space that reflects how they actually spend their time and money.
Twenty-one years in, the question that follows MomoCon into 2027 and beyond is whether an event at this scale can maintain the energy and intimacy that made it worth attending in the first place. Growth is impressive. Community is harder to scale. Which raises a real question worth thinking about: at what point does a fan convention become so large that the fans themselves start to feel like the backdrop?
