thats what i was thinking that Dave and the rest of the design committee must have gotten really stressed trying to think of a new game and decided to play tic-tack-toe and then it dawned on them, "this could be a great game but first we have to make it extremely complicated and with stuff no one has worked with before."
or maybe they just thought of a cool game and it just happened to be similar to tic-tack-toe. i think the most important part of the game is what you do in auto mode.