Rube Gross & Company was a short-lived pinball manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington, active from 1934 to 1935. The firm produced at least three known games during its brief existence, working across both the Pure Mechanical and Electromechanical technologies that coexisted in pinball’s earliest years.

The company’s first known game, Torpedo (1934), was an electromechanical table with a military-nautical theme featuring trap holes, free play holes, and kickers — including a bottom-of-playfield kicker that repeatedly returned balls to play until they landed in a score hole. The following month brought The Mystery Six (1934), a pure mechanical game advertised as requiring no batteries, with a “mystery” ball-advance system that the company promoted with sixty-day location test results. The company’s final known title, Fury (1935), returned to electromechanical design.

Like fellow Seattle manufacturer Shyvers, Rube Gross & Company was one of the small Pacific Northwest firms that emerged during pinball’s explosive early growth in the 1930s. The company ceased production by 1935, leaving behind a tiny but documented catalog that illustrates the geographic breadth of the Depression-era pinball industry, which briefly supported manufacturers far from the Chicago hub that would soon dominate the business.