Pages not listed, how to rank?

Hi,

I want to publish pages that don’t appear on the home page but still be able to turn up on Google (for example to start ranking for upcoming games). I have seen other webmasters do this without any internal links to that page from what I could tell.

Will Google rank a page that is not internally linked? If not, how could that other site manage to do it? Is it possible to add individual pages to the sitemap? I looked at the other sites sitemap and the pages do not appear there. Seems only posts are showing.