MineSweeper is based on Microsoft's Minesweeper that was shipped with many versions of Windows, although the origins of the game go further back than that. What motivated me writing the game was that osxMineSweeper, a popular implementation of Minesweeper on the Mac, became incompatible with the most recent versions of OSX and ceased to run. While other implementation exist, many have issues with Mac's retina displays. The choice of Qt for the GUI allows MineSweeper to work on various platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac) without the need to rewrite a single line of the code. The use of SVG allows easy high resolution graphics on any screen (including Retina displays) and whatever will come along in the future.
As always the most complete history of Minesweeper can be found on Wikipedia. A large amount of general material on Minesweeper is available on minesweeper.info.