Holy hell there are a lot 3rd party "variants" of xbox 360 consoles. I am going to draw the line an excluding vinyl wraps and paint jobs, even if they were done professionally and more than just a one-off. Remeber with the faceplate, this was the era of customizing your console aesthetically, and there are literally a hundred or so known vinyl wrap/paintjob variants done by 3rd parties largely for promotional reasons. So this is just going to cover the standard releases, the special and limited editions, as well as official microsoft custom limited runs.
First came the fat consoles, two at launch including the "core" edition which didn't have a hard drive or a silver dvd tray cover. Eventually the "core" edition was replaced by the "arcade" edition which added hdmi output and came with a memory card. Next case the "elite" which was fat variant in black with a larger hard drive. That then came out in white with varying hard drive capacities. From there the S series which reduced the size of the console and updated the aesthetic. This first came out in matte black, then glossy black, then glossy white. Lastly, the E series came out in 2013 which was restyled to match the design of the Xbox One.
As far as I can tell the first limited edition console was for Halo 3 which came out a couple weeks before the release of Halo 3, which was September 25th, 2007.
Next came the limited edition console for Resident Evil 5, which was the Elite variant in red. This came out in March of 2009
After that came out another limited edition Console variant console, this time for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 which released in November of 2009.
The brings us on to the Slim variant limited edition consoles. A slew of three limited edition variants all came out during the 2011 holiday season. One for gears of war 3, call of duty modern warfare 3, and one star wars related gears towards a kinect star wars game. Each console came out with their respective game's release date.
Right before Microsoft released the Xbox One, they released the E variant of the Xbox 360. And for some unknown reason, Walmart released a special blue edition bundle of it a year later in September 2014.
So that covers all of the retail variants of the Xbox 360, both standard, limited, and special editions.
So I said I wouldn't cover 3rd party vinyl wraps and paint jobs, but that doesn't mean Microsoft released their own slew of consoles. Since information on these is more murky I'm not going to share them in chronological order. The first logical grouping is that Microsoft gave out custom Xbox 360's as a reward to employees. Summer Interns got custom xboxes as a part of some end-of-summer celebration in 2009 and 2011.
There were also a slew of Microsoft subsidiary branded consoles like one for "Microsoft Research", and a bunch of other ones that were just vinyl wraps. I can't tell if the Research text is printed on or adhered, though.
Lastly, there were an xbox live 10th anniversary celebration console. This has to be probably the rare xbox 360 that was made by Microsoft and was meant to be given regular people (albeit their employees).
At this point this is where I draw the line. There are more consoles that didn't just have custom vinyl wraps and paint jobs but they were likely meant for [game developers doing their job](quest-software.jpg) the same way development kits exist. Microsoft did its fair share of 1st stickers, and third parties did some intricate and awesome variants, but it's hard to know how many there were, and much easier for people to replicate these and pass them off as legitimate.
Did I miss anything? I'm sure I did. Please correct me in my discord channel