Multiple Selections were one of the earliest core features built for Sublime Text, and weren't inspired from other software. I don't think TextMate existed when I implemented this.
Multiple-select was indeed one of the key reasons to use it, as a programmers editor, even though it was intended for more general-purpose word processing tasks.
Anecdotal experience: my first unboxing of ST2 led to the proclamation: "finally, someone has done multi-select cursors again, almost as good as PC-Write back in the day!"
TextMate 1 had multiple column editing, but true multi caret editing was not until TextMate 2 in 2011.
... Unlike most of Sublime Text which was a close copy of TM features except for the ability for users to edit customizations, making the Sublime community a giant leech that sucked all of the air out of TextMate bundle development without ever contributing anything back.
Sad history.