Climate Pledge

Lore & Background

When the NHL awarded Seattle its expansion franchise, the city did not simply rent a generic box. The Kraken ownership group and the Climate Pledge partnership committed to building a facility that would make a statement about what a 21st-century arena could be: energy-efficient, visually striking, and open to the community even when the pucks were not in play. The result is a building whose exterior and interior design emphasize natural light, sustainable materials, and a fluid, organic aesthetic that echoes the tentacled Kraken logo rather than the hard angles of older hockey palaces.

From the very first home game, the fanbase that poured into the lower bowl and upper deck brought with it a distinctly Seattle character—flannel over jerseys, rain-slicked jackets, a mix of lifelong hockey families and curious newcomers who had never seen a live NHL game. The noise in those early nights was not the polished, scripted roar of a franchise with thirty years of tradition; it was raw, improvisational, and genuinely excited. Fans invented their own calls, their own rituals, their own way of turning a 60-foot-wide rink into a living thing. The arena, in turn, absorbed that energy and made it feel like home.

There is a particular quality to a Kraken home game that veteran fans describe as a slow build: the crowd starts conversational, then the first goal hits and the sound swells, and by the third period the entire structure seems to vibrate. The sustainability features—reduced energy draw, water-reclamation systems, the visible commitment to lower emissions—give the building a quiet moral weight that resonates with a fanbase that tends to care about more than just the final score. It is, in the words of one long-time Seattle sports fan, 'the arena that feels like it was grown rather than built.'

In Their Own Story

The rain had been falling all afternoon, a steady Pacific Northwest drizzle that turned the SoDo streets into dark mirrors. Inside, the ice was fresh, the Zamboni's fresh cuts still catching the overhead lights in long white ribbons. A single fan sat in the upper deck, a coffee going cold in her hands, watching the players skate laps. She was not a season-ticket holder. She had bought a single ticket for the first home game, a gift from her father, who had watched the '94 Stanley Cup finals on a crackling TV in a garage in Tacoma and never quite recovered. The arena was nearly empty, the boards quiet, and for a few minutes the only sound was the soft whisper of blades on ice and the distant hum of the building's systems. Then the crowd started to fill, the low murmur rising, and she felt the floor beneath her feet begin to tremble with a thousand pairs of skates finding their edges. She smiled, took a sip of the cold coffee, and thought: *this is what Dad meant.*

Reader's Guide

Climate Pledge Arena sits in Seattle's SoDo district, a short walk from the light-rail station and surrounded by the low-slung warehouses and new mixed-use developments that define the neighborhood. The exterior is sleek and modern, with a large curved façade that catches the grey Pacific light. Inside, the sightlines are unusually good for a hockey-specific building: the lower bowl is close to the ice, the upper deck rises steeply, and the massive center-hung video board dominates the space without obstructing views.

The most distinctive tradition is the fan-generated vocal call that builds during key sequences—power plays, empty-net stretches, the final minute of a close game. It is not a scripted chant but a collective, almost instinctive sound: a deep, resonant push of air from thousands of throats that fans describe as the ocean 'waking up.' It gets louder with every shift and can rattle the glass.

The fanbase is as diverse as the city itself. You will find tech workers in Patagonia vests next to third-generation hockey families from the Eastside, college students from UW and Seattle U, and a steady stream of visitors from the broader Pacific Northwest who make the trip specifically for the Kraken. The local identity is unapologetically Seattle: craft beer on tap, a nod to the rain, a quiet pride in being the city that built something new rather than importing something old. The arena feels like a public square that happens to have a rink in the middle.

Did You Know?

• Climate Pledge Arena was designed with a sustainability-first mandate from the ground up, incorporating energy-efficient systems and environmentally conscious building materials as core design principles rather than afte
• The arena serves as the shared home of two professional teams—the Seattle Kraken (NHL) and the Seattle Thunderbirds (AHL)—making it one of the few venues in North America to host both a major and minor league franchise s
• Seattle's NHL expansion was announced in 2018, and the franchise's first regular-season game was played in the 2021–22 season, meaning the arena and the team essentially debuted together for the public.
• The naming-rights partnership with Climate Pledge, a corporate sustainability initiative, made the arena one of the first major North American sports venues to carry an environmental-mission brand as its official name.