Michael Rowland

Michael Rowland is the owner and founder of Escape Experience, Chattanooga's first escape room company, which he opened in 2014. The idea took hold after a group of friends and family played one of Nashville's earliest escape rooms and loved it. Nashville already had one, so they looked to Chattanooga — which had none — and Escape Experience became the city's first escape room. It has since grown into three venues across Nashville and Chattanooga, with more than 100,000 players and a 4.9-star reputation.

Before Escape Experience, Michael ran a small marketing firm focused on website development, SEO, advertising, and digital strategy — the very skills he would use to launch and grow the business himself. Earlier, he served as Director of Marketing and Corporate Development for WD Schock Company, a management-consulting firm in the aviation industry. He earned his MBA at Middle Tennessee State University, and his undergraduate background in construction management — plus summers spent framing houses — gave him and his cousin David the confidence to design and build many of Escape Experience's original sets and puzzles by hand. (Fittingly, the spark came just after the two returned from a 30-day attempt to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail.)

Today, Michael stays involved in nearly every part of the business — operations, marketing, the website, and the unglamorous necessities like payroll and bookkeeping — but his favorite work is on the creative side: designing puzzles, developing stories, and building and improving the physical sets. The day-to-day games are run by a great team of trained staff and general managers, though he still enjoys jumping in to host rooms during busy stretches like the holidays. One of his favorite sights is several generations of a family — grandparents, parents, and kids — working through a room together.

His design philosophy is simple: a great escape room should feel like a real place, not a room full of boxes. The best games create discovery through secret spaces and hidden reveals, with sets that look, feel, and sound like the world players have stepped into. If the story says you're in a prison, it should feel like a prison; if it's a bunker buried under a mountain, it should feel like one.

During the COVID-19 shutdowns, with the business on the brink, Michael created what he believes was the world's first live remote escape room — a game master streaming live from a real room while players direct the action by video call. The concept was entirely his team's own, and as far as they know no one had done it before. The format helped save Escape Experience and was soon adopted across the industry; some of the very first groups to play were other escape room owners trying to survive. Escape Experience still runs live remote games today for teams and families as far away as Australia and Los Angeles.

Michael was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, with family roots around Rockvale and Eagleville, and he spent parts of his childhood in the Tuscaloosa and Birmingham areas of Alabama. Chattanooga, though, has been special to him since boyhood — his family vacationed there nearly every year, riding the Alpine Slide, staying at the Chattanooga Choo Choo, and swimming away the afternoons — which made it a natural home for the business. Today he and his wife run Escape Experience together while raising their two daughters in Chattanooga, a city he loves more than ever.