Basically thereThere is no way to do go = new GameObject;go = new GameObject(); without adding it to the scene.
I'm working on an rtsRTS where the player base needs to be persistent, and essentially, we serialize everything they've done and load it back in at run time using modified assets from the store.
Most output to xmlXML or jsonJSON so its reallyit's pretty straight forward to load the file and manipulate it as you wish.
Hope this helps
Marc