Nah, it was a 'very big thing' at the time. Wizards took a axe to their largest rival in the western CCG market, and it was very public. The offer they made to Lucasarts was online for a while, and they even traded in on Richard Garfields name to get the license 'this guy mad magic, he'll design a game to make you millions!'.
It was also, at the time, quite an incestious industry - everyone knew other people in other companies. There's literally no way Mark wouldn't know what had happened and how it had been done.
N.b. I neither worked on or playtested for Star Wars, and didn't even like Decipher's game, so hardly a big fan - just found the way Mark outlined it slightly jarring given that it was a very deliberate, very public attempt to kill off their main rival at the time. Unfortunately it ended up working, although whether decipher would have lasted even with Star Wars is in question given what happened to the CCG industry in the end.
It's likely that MaRo was aware of it at the time, but it's been long enough that all he remembers of that time is actually designing the game. It's also likely that since none of that had anything to do with his work on the game itself, he chose not to bring it up since it would distract from what else he had to say.
How Magic Cards are Developed Latest Developments - The M-Files: Oath of the Gatewatch part 2
* Elemental Uprising originally made a land into a 4/4 Elemental creature with "Tap: Fight target creature", but they changed it because it was too close to a straight-up kill spell.
* Ruin in Their Wake was originally Rampant Growth just for a Wastes, but it was too strong with Siege Rhino, so they changed it to Ramp only if you have a Wastes already.
* Oath of Nissa was originally a 2G card that put two creature/land cards into your hand, but it was thought to be too close to Divination.
* Jace's Sanctum in Magic Origins originally allowed you to spend mana on planeswalkers as though it was any color. Why this was in blue, I have no clue. It was only changed because there weren't any straight-up planeswalkers in Magic Origins. This ability was moved to Oath of Nissa.
* Before they decided on having two Wastes at common, one of those slots was taken up by a Radiant Fountain reprint.
* The dual land cycle went through variations where they also tapped for C and where they had the basic land types. They also looked into reprinting Coastal Tower directly but changing the names of the other cards in that cycle. It seems like they're interested in consistently printing these cards in things like Deck Builder's Toolkits.
* Wandering Fumarole forms an infinite combo with Ceaseless Searblades.
* As one might have guessed, Ruins of Oran-Rief only puts a counter on one creature because of Hangarback Walker.
* The C cards got pushed in order to make sure they got played in color-heavy decks, instead of dividing Standard into colorless and color-heavy decks.
* Matter Reshaper originally didn't care about the converted mana cost of cards it got from the library, so it could have gotten Atarka and Kozilek.
* They were really worried about Kozilek and See the Unwritten, but for some reason, they seemed to be unwilling to move much of its power to an on-cast ability for a while.
On another note,
LSV's introduction to Modern... didn't he already do this? Though he does cover the Modern Eldrazi deck now.
EDIT: Also, highlighted in the Mothership's January 29 daily update,
an interesting look at the work put into a cosplay of Narset Transcendent.
