In 2004, a small gathering of Japanese animation fans met at Georgia Tech. By Memorial Day weekend 2015, that gathering had become MomoCon — a 20,000-person convention occupying two exhibition halls at the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta, with more than 200 vendors and a programming schedule packed with workshops, panels, celebrity signings, cosplay competitions, and gaming tournaments.
The growth trajectory told a story about downtown Atlanta's capacity to support multiple large-scale fan conventions. Dragon Con owned Labor Day weekend. MomoCon claimed Memorial Day. Between them, the two events bookended the summer with tens of thousands of costumed, enthusiastic visitors who filled downtown hotels, ate at downtown restaurants, and turned the city's convention infrastructure into a playground for fans of anime, gaming, comics, and every adjacent culture.
What Makes MomoCon Different
MomoCon co-founder Chris Stuckey built the convention around a principle that distinguished it from Dragon Con and most other major fan conventions: it was family-friendly by design. The programming, the atmosphere, and the vendor selection were curated to welcome families with children — an audience that the after-dark, hotel-bar culture of Dragon Con did not prioritize.
The emphasis on accessibility extended to the content. MomoCon featured voice actors from popular animated series and video games — Keith David, Steve Downes, Sarah Anne Williams — alongside gaming areas that mixed arcade classics with current titles. The cosplay community at MomoCon trended younger and more anime-focused than Dragon Con's broader pop culture spectrum, reflecting the convention's roots in Japanese animation fandom.
The Move Downtown
The move to the Georgia World Congress Center was a milestone. MomoCon had progressed from Georgia Tech classrooms to downtown hotel ballrooms before outgrowing those venues entirely. The World Congress Center — the same facility that hosted trade shows, corporate conventions, and the periphery of major sporting events — provided the exhibition space that a 20,000-person convention required.
For downtown Atlanta's convention economy, MomoCon's arrival at the World Congress Center meant another weekend of full hotels and busy restaurants during a period — late May — that might otherwise be quiet. The convention joined Dragon Con, the SEC Championship, and other annual events as part of the calendar that downtown's hospitality industry built its revenue projections around.
What started in a Georgia Tech meeting room had, by 2015, become proof that downtown Atlanta could support a fan convention ecosystem — not just one dominant event, but a culture that generated new gatherings as the audience grew. MomoCon was not Dragon Con's competitor. It was its complement: different weekend, different audience, same downtown.
Original reporting by Georgia Public Broadcasting / SciTech Now Georgia, May 29, 2015.